The Liberator William Lloyd Garrison

TL:WLG $8.50

William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist,
was the conscience of his age. A tenacious,
idealistic young man of twenty-six when he
began the publication of The Liberator, he
served warning that his moral indictment of
slavery would be uncompromising: "I am in
earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not
excuse — I will not retreat a single inch —
AND i WILL BE HEARD." Garrison was as good
as his word. He, more than any other American
of his time, was responsible for the atmosphere
of moral absolutism which led to the Civil War
and the emancipation of the slaves.

Taking the turbulent career of the abolitionist
as his focal point, the author brilliantly evokes
the social, political and religious forces which
made the ante-bellum period one of the most
fascinating in American history. In the thirty
years before the Civil War, Americans were
possessed by a dramatic certainty that the New
World could produce a new race of men strong
in their natural goodness and their commitment
to total freedom. All Americans shared in the
perfectionist dream in some way, for perfec-
tionism meant freedom — freedom from the
past and the burdens of history, freedom from
institutions and power, freedom from sin and
guilt. Perfectionism verified the American belief
in the second chance.

Through this period moved the controversial

figure of William Lloyd Garrison, a man both

revered and vilified. An ascetic, moralistic., and

(Continued on second flap)

0 DD01

The Liberator

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
A Biography

by John L* Thomas

With

Little, Brown and Company * Boston • Toronto

COPYRIGHT © 1963 BY JOHN L. THOMAS

AIX RIGHTS RESERVED* NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY IWB REPRO-
DUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE
PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO MAY QUOTE IIEIEF JPAS-

SAGES IN A REVIEW TO BE PRINTED IN A MAtiAZXNF, OE NEWSPAI^ER*

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATAXXX5 <!AR0 NO. 63-8310
FIRST EDXTION

Published simultaneously in Canada

by Little, Brown <z^ Company (Canada) Limited

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

In Memory of
MY FATHER

Contents

Prologue 3

1. Newhuryport Boyhood 7

2. The Young Conservative 27
3* Boston 54
4* Benjamin Lundy 74

5. The Road to Prison 9*

6. Launching the Liberator 114
7* Fanning the Blames 129
8* Triumph and Doubt in 1833 155
9, Mobs and Martyrs 178

10- "Our Doom as & Nation Is Sealed" 209

1 1, A Woman in the Pulpit 236

12, The Politics of Perfection 156

13, Triumph of the Saints z8x
14* "No Union with Slaveholders** 305

15. Compromise 338

1 6. The Great Slave Power Conspiracy 367
17* Secession 388
1 8. Armageddon at Last 409

19. Reconstruction and Redemption

Epilogue 45*

Notes 4^°

Bibliography 4^4

Bibliographical Note 49-

Index 495

Illustrations

("Between pages 246 and 247)

Helen Benson Garrison
Garrison and Wendell Phillips

Garrison at fifty

Garrison at seventy

Benjamin Lundy

Prudence Crandall

Samuel Joseph May

Edmund Quiney

Angelina Grimki

Sarah Grimk6

Theodore Weld

Henry C Wright

Nathaniel P, Rogers

Abby Kelley Foster

Stephen Symonds Foster

The Liberator

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Prologue

"TT WILL BE as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as

J[ justice/' So William Lloyd Garrison warned the Ameri-
can people in 1831 in the first number of the Liberator, his

abolitionist newspaper and for thirty-five years the strident
voice of his anti-slavery conscience, "On this subject, I do not
wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no!

Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm;
tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the
ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from
the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use
moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I
will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a
single inch — AND i WILL BE HEARD."

Garrison was as good as his word. Until Lee's surrender
at Appomattox brought an end to slavery in America he
made himself heard, at first with hatred, then with grudging
admiration, and finally with respect. He hated slavery be-
cause it denied God to black and white men alike. This
hatred he preached to a whole generation of Northerners and
made the central theme of his life. He was an irascible man,
irresponsible and often vindictive, but he was ako single-
minded and courageous, If too often his moralizing seemed
empty and pretentious, the moral values he taught were real

PROLOGUE

and compelling. More than any other American of his time
he was responsible for the atmosphere of moral absolutism
which caused the Civil War and freed the slave,

The contradictions in the man found their reflection in the
dominant mood of ante-bellum America, The American
people proclaimed the virtues of the free individual and
regularly elected military men for presidents. They professed
a hatred of privilege and thought of themselves as a chosen
people. They feared the power of institutions and proceeded
to organize societies and institutions of every conceivable
kind. They boasted of their secular Enlightenment heritage,
yet remained profoundly Christian. They talked like prag-
matists and acted like idealists. They preached equality and
practiced slavery. And finally, they believed in peace but
went quickly and dutifully to war. This was the generation
which began by vilifying Garrison and ended by honoring his
courage and foresight.

When he died in 1 879 few Americans doubted that he had
been the founder and chief prophet of the abolitionist cru-
sade. In the eighty-four years since his death, however, the
Garrison legend, which he deliberately constructed, has
crumbled beneath the repeated hammerings of historians who
have questioned his primacy, minimized his effectiveness,
emphasized his fanaticism, and challenged his premises. Some
of his critics have discovered new anti-slavery heroes to re-
place him. Others have singled out his turbulent career as
proof of the dangers of moral abstractions and the need for a
pragmatic approach to politics.

Because he belonged to a deeply religious age Garrison
would not have understood a view of history which ignored
the hand of God in the affairs of men. The dates of Ms life-
time, 1805-1879, serve as the terminals of the age of Ameri-
can religious reform; those of the Liberator, 1831-1865, mark

PROLOGUE

the life span of anti-slavery. In his mind the energies of
religious reform and the forces of abolition were one and the
same. He only knew that lie and his followers were Christian
soldiers doing God's work in the world.

The American abolitionists constituted a religion, and Gar-
rison the leader of a schismatic sect within that religion. He
took the formula for salvation of the religious revivalists of
his day and applied it directly to slavery. "Immediate eman-
cipation" as he taught it was not a program but an attitude,
an urgent warning that shut out thoughts of expediency or
compromise. Applied to politics, it fostered an apocalyptic
view of the world and released in him hidden desires for per-
fection* Christian perfection, in turn, offered the comforting
ideal of the perfect society, harmonious, self-regulating, free
from the demonic aspects of power. Garrison's experiment in
practical piety carried him out of the anti-slavery camp, be-
yond the Jacksonian compass to the very borders of Christian
anarchy. It took secession and the coming of a war he had
predicted to recall him to the realities of institutionalized
slavery and the task of abolishing it. For the failure of his
generation to achieve the racial democracy which the Civil
War made possible he must be held accountable. 'He made the
moral indictment of slavery which precipitated the war,
but he lacked the understanding and sustaining vision to lead
his countrymen toward the kind of democratic society in
which he believed* Both in his great achievement and in his
tragic failure he spoke for his age*

Ncwburyport Boyhood

ON A MARCH DAY in the year 1873 William Lloyd Gar-
rison sat in his study drafting a formal reply to friends
who urged him to write his autobiography. "There are in-
numerable battles yet to be fought for the right," he wrote

in his neat and careful script as though for the eyes of poster-
ity, "and those who shall hereafter go forth to defend the

righteous cause . , . cannot fail to derive strength and in-
spiration from an intelligent acquaintance with the means and

methods used in the Anti-Slavery movement/'1 He was not
sure he was up to the job himself. Now nearing seventy and
in failing health, he knew his work was finished. The prospect

of compiling a history of American abolitionism — for such

he believed his life story to be — seemed uninviting. He would
need time, he told his friends, to consider the project.

Sitting erect at his desk, his blunt features crowned by a
massive bald head, cold blue eyes peering over square, steel-
rimmed spectacles, Garrison looked the very embodiment of
moral reform* There was a righteousness in his face which
no one could mistake for humility. For thirty-five years he
had been loved by only a handful of people and fiercely
hated by many more who saw nothing but his fanaticism and
pursuit of notoriety* Now he was a legend, hailed throughout
the North as the genius of the anti-slavery movement by a

THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Union all too willing to represent the Civil War as a triumph
of justice and to name him one of its heroes. Much as he
craved recognition, he could not accept this praise, for he
knew that not long ago many of these same admirers had
denounced him as a traitor to his country, lie was not so
jealous of his reputation as to accept fame on such easy terms.
Admiration without assent to his principles left him unmoved.
In his mind the emancipation of the slave had been a simple
case of cause and effect: the moral energy of the abolitionists
finally roused a conscience-stricken nation to action* I le and
his followers were God's instruments. Through them God
had made a civil war and freed the slave.

Garrison's faith in the moral regeneration of mankind
grew out of his belief in an infinitely merciful God who
offers eternal salvation from sin. It was a religion of the
heart rather than the head, a complex of emotional impulses
defying analysis and testifying only to the will to believe.
The true Christian, once assured of divine aid, purged him-
self of sin and put on Christ Then, seeking out and joining
with fellow converts, he might unhinge the immoral govern-
ments of this world and usher in a reign of true holiness* It
was this militant Christianity which was the driving force of
abolitionism.

The climate of post-Civil War America was not congenial
to such Christian idealism. A new and alien science was be-
ginning to challenge Garrison's belief in preordained progress*
Even as he sat at his desk contemplating his life's work, he
sensed that he had lived beyond his time, and that his faith
held little appeal for the new generation. All the more reason,
perhaps, to tell the trae story of American anti-slavery. To
those who believed still in the perfectibility of man he would
offer the evidence of his life. The story of his life, like the
history of the reform movement fox which it was expended*

NEWBURYPORT BOYHOOD

has Its beginnings in the religious ferment of the Great
Awakening as it made itself felt in the frontier revival In
eighteenth-century Nova Scotia.

The Garrison story begins in Nova Scotia one day in the
year 1763 with the arrival from England of Joseph Garrison,

the grandfather of William Lloyd Garrison. Here on the
frontier along the Saint John River, which cuts through the
deep forests of New Brunswick, Joseph Garrison met a group
of settlers from the Merrimack Valley whose names had
figured regularly if not prominently In the history of the
colony for over a hundred years. These Massachusetts families
were part of the first migration of adventurous New Eng-
landers drawn to the frontier by the promise of cheap lands
and an urge to spread the Great Awakening. The movement
was mostly a communal enterprise: groups of families and
neighbors hired agents to purchase the lands, settled the
tracts together, and quickly organized themselves into trans-
planted New England townships. Such was the arrangement
which led to the founding in 1764 of Maugervllle, some fifty
miles up the Saint John. One of the lots was given to Joseph
Garrison, who was already exploring the surrounding country
with an eye toward establishing a lumber business.

Nothing is known of Joseph's former life in England* Ap-
parently he was just one of a great number of his countrymen
who took advantage of the return of peace to try their for-
tunes in the New World* He soon joined the New Englanders
and In the summer of 1764 married Mary Palmer, daughter
of Deacon Daniel Palmer, one of the leaders of the com-
munity. Thereupon he received a grant of land from his
father~in»kw on an upriver tributary where he settled to the
task of clearing five hundred acres and raising a family of
nine children?

io THE LIBERATOR:

Slight of stature, with a scarlet birthmark and a congenital
limp, Joseph was an unprepossessing man who lacked both the

physical and temperamental qualities of the pioneer. In him
optimism ran unchecked by the more sober virtues of shrewd-
ness and hard work. Along the river, even in his grandson's
day, the Garrisons were known for their easygoing ways
and sanguine views. Joseph simply lacked the industry to
make his ideas work for him. He was full of schemes for
exploiting the new country. He discovered coal deposits
along nearby Grand Lake, but his plan for mining them
proved impractical. When he contracted to make barrel
staves for New England distilleries in 1772, the Revolution
soon put an end to his hopes for a fortune in the lumber
trade,3

In the years after Lexington, when his father-in-law plunged
the town into revolutionary ferment, Joseph stood ul<x>f,
refusing to sign town resolutions supporting the New Eng-
land colonies or to throw his lot in with the Loyalists, Neither
before nor after the Revolution did he join in the political
life of the settlement, but remained on its edges, an amiable
but enigmatic figure, untouched by its lively religious interest
or its spirit of enterprise. He died in 1783, a disappointed nwn,
leaving a widow, nine children and a rundown farm,

Abijah, the fifth child of Joseph and Mary Garrison sine!
father of William Lloyd Garrison, was born in 1773. The
pleasures of farming which eluded his father appealed even
less to the boy, who shared Joseph's penchant for dreaming
and longed to go to sea. After his father's death Abijah stayed
on the family place just long enough to acquire a nidimenttiry
education and then shipped aboard a schooner in the carrying
trade, learned his seamanship from a cousin, and eventually
became a sailing master. The ships Abijah sailed leisurely
runs to Newburyport, often stopping to take on cargo at the

NEWBURYPORT BOYHOOD II

fishing villages and lumber ports along the coast. Abijah
liked the unattached life of a sailor and marveled at the cos-
mopolitan atmosphere of Ncwburyport, which made the
river towns in the province seem like lonely backwashes in

a flood tide of commercial prosperity. He also came to enjoy
the company of cronies in waterfront taverns and developed

a taste for the rum which his ship brought back from New
England.
Abijah Garrison was a maverick. Tall and fair, he was a

handsome man despite his prematurely thinning hair and a
birthmark like his father's. His full reddish beard and lively
blue eyes gave him the romantic look of a wanderer, and his

boisterous spirits made him a choice companion. He had a
ready tongue and a keen sense of humor along with a broad
sentimental streak. Yet Abijah, like his father, was a born

failure — genial, weak-willed and unlucky. He dreamed of
the day when he could sail his own schooner and meanwhile

played the errant son, ascribing to misfortune his failure to
get ahead in the world. As he approached manhood his rela-
tions with his family grew steadily less cordial, an apparent
reluctance to pay his debts more than once straining the
parental bond. More than once, too, his genial manner gave
way to dark suspicions of plots against his good name. He
resented criticism of his free and easy life, and in moments
of despair saw himself as a tragicomic victim of fate. For all
his irresolution and occasional ill-natured outbursts, Abijah
easily won friends among his landbound neighbors, who
listened to his tales of adventure that linked their drab lives
with the bustling world of New England. To them he seemed
a strange man, oddly likable in spite of his taste for rum and
fear of hard work*

This was how he impressed Fanny Lloyd when^ oa one of
his stops at Deer Isle in Passamaquoddy Bay in the year 1798,

THE LIBF^ATOR: wfrxiAr.oYo GARRISON

he wandered into a Baptist prayer meeting, spied the hand-
some "Miss Blue Jacket," introduced himself and boldly
escorted her home. Frances Maria Lloyd was the daughter
of Irish immigrants who settled on Deer Isle just prior to the
Revolution. The Lloyds were not like the Garrisons, Fanny's
father, Andrew Lloyd, was a narrow and hard-bitten Anglo-
Irishman who had left the grinding poverty of Ireland for
apprenticeship in America.4 Hard work paid off and Lloyd
made a success of pioneering. At the time of Abijah's visit
he was a pilot in the coastal trade and a sheep farmer on the
windswept island. A man of moderate means, he was a
stanch Anglican and the iron- willed patriarch of a sizable
family, admired and respected by his neighbors. His daughter
never forgot the esteem which her father enjoyed in the
island community, for Andrew Lloyd was everything that
his future son-in-law could never be — proud, ambitious, un-
yielding and righteous.

Fanny herself was a tall willowy girl with features too
severe to be pretty, snapping black eyes and raven-black hair.
Unlike her people, she was a devout Baptist, the child of a
religious revival which swept across Nova Scotia in the last
years of the eighteenth century.

Many of the New England 6migr6s brought to the frontier
the same "New-Light" enthusiasm which Jonathan Edwards
kindled in the Connecticut Valley in the 1 740*8. The New-
Lights were religious emotionalists who demanded direct
and visible proof of divine grace as the test of salvation. The
redeemed were expected to dramatize their struggle for
sanctification publicly, and in gatherings which were often
marked by excesses to put on Christ and declare themselves
blessed. Carried to the frontier by impassioned converts, this
new religious spirit spread like a flash fire across the province,
engulfing whole congregations and leaving in its wake

NEWBURYPORT BOYHOOD 13

dreds of "burned-over" communities of the newly saved,
For twenty-five years Nova Scotia was torn by the same
dissension and controversy which Edwards's Great Awaken-
ing had fomented in New England. The result was religious
revolution. On the eve of the American War for Independ-
ence a majority of the settlers in the province were Congre-
gationalists. Twenty-five years later only two Congrega-
tional churches were left, the Anglican establishment had
crumbled, and a militant Baptist Church stood everywhere
unchallenged.5

Fanny Lloyd was won over by a Baptist evangelist who
roamed the province in the last years of the century. Hers
was the classic frontier tale of the worldly young woman
who came to scoff and stayed to pray. The effects of Baptist
preaching on her strong will were mixed. At first she suc-
cumbed to an obsessive concern with self and agonized over
her unworthincss. But the urge to proselytize — to bring
others to salvation — proved too strong and hardened her
will She could, and usually did, profess humility, but she
could not practice it. Try as she might to repress them, pride
and a driving ambition always managed to betray her es-
sentially compulsive nature. Fanny was caught between a
yearning for personal holiness and a longing for power over
other people* Above all, she wanted to reach out to other
sinners, convince them of their infinite guilt, and save them.
Though site toyed with the notion of renouncing the world
and its snares, she was never able to relinquish this hold on
other people.

Her decision to abandon a comfortable Anglicanism for
the soul-searching rigors of the Baptists had cost Fanny her
home and family. Andrew Lloyd, outraged at the "vulgar
enthusiasms" of itinerant preachers, pleaded with his daughter,
then threatened, and finally turned her out of his house. She

14 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

was living with an uncle when Abijah met and courted her.
Her life was lonely after she left her father, and Abijah of-
fered the security of marriage and a home of her own. She
thought she saw in him a good and generous man who could
be tamed of his irregular habits by a religious experience like
her own. What Abijah thought he was getting is less clear*
What he did get was more than he bargained for, Fanny's
determination overawed the easygoing seaman, and her
quick tongue proved more than a match for his. The Impres-
sionable Abijah soon fell in love and married Fanny some-
time in the year 1798.

Their marriage did not flourish, Abijah's carefree manner
and lack of steady income vexed his proud wife. As he grew
increasingly unmanageable Fanny retreated to the solaces
of her religion. Recalling the "rude blast of misfortunes'*
that followed her marriage, she confessed that "had it not
been for an over-ruling Providence, 1 must have sunk under
their pressure. I was taught to see that all my dreams of hap*
piness in this life were chimerical; the efforts that we make
here are all an imbecility in themselves and illusive, but re-
ligion is perennial. It fortifies the mind to support trouble,
elevates the affections of the heart, and its perpetuity lias no
end."6 Fanny was never so happy as when she could forget
the problem of keeping her husband on the straight and nar-
row path and, with her mind "engaged in religion,1 ? con-
template her heavenly reward,

Abijah, in his turn, was amazed and then a little frightened
by his wife's righteousness. Life at home became a battle of
wills in which he soon knew he was fairly beaten. Hi* turned
for comfort to waterfront cronies and drink. For the next
few years their life together was one long and dreary suc-
cession of removals, first to the Garrison farm on the river,
where Fanny lost her first child; then to Saint John, where

NEWBXJRYPORT BOYHOOD

a daughter Caroline Eliza and a son, James Holley, were born;

and then on to Granvllle. With them each time went Abij all's
dream of success.

As her family increased Fanny found her unsettled life
more and more difficult. Abijah suffered from periodic at-
tacks of rheumatism which kept him at home dependent on
the support of his mother and stepfather, whose care he
acknowledged with a due sense of gratitude but with little
intention of repayment* His wife worked hard at converting
him to Baptist ways, and Abijah even confessed a desire, no
doubt half sincere, to "enjoy a Ray of Divine Light from the
Throne of God and Lamb." At sea he would write Fanny
of his yearning to be at home with his family "Free'd from
a Tempestuous Sky and Enraged Ocean, with Just Enough
(Good God) to supply our Real Wants and Necessities."7
He had no real intention of leaving the sea, however, for he
was a skilled seaman if a poor provider. Reluctantly Fanny
admitted that she could not change him,

By 1805 it was time once more for Abijah to be moving
on. Renewed hostilities between France and England and
the prohibition of the American trade hit the Maritimes
hard, and work as a sailing master became difficult to find.
After months of indecision Abijah determined to take his
family to New England, where a hazardous neutral trade
was still profitable* He admitted that he had been following
"the Rule of false Position, or rather permutation, these Last
Seven Years" and promised to mend his ways. Perhaps a
change of scene would help. "Not that I am dissatisfied to-
wards Government," he wrote to his parents, "but the barren-
ness of these Eastern Climes rather Obliges me to seek the
welfare of my family in a more hospitable Climate, where I
shall be less exposed to the Ravages of war and stagnation of
business, which is severely felt in Nova Scotia*"8 Appended

1 6 THE LIBERATOR: WILUAM LLOYD GARRISON

to her husband's excuses was a brief note from Fanny asking
God's blessing in all things temporal and spiritual

A few weeks later, in the early spring of 1805, Ahijah and
his family sailed for Newburyport There they settled in a
small frame house on School Street next door to the Presby-
terian vestry where the famed revivalist George Whitcfield
had died thirty-five years before. In this house on December
ifiijjJos, William Lloyd Garrison was born.

In 1805 Newburyport was a thriving seaport town of five
thousand people which the Revolution had transformed from
a patrician village into one of the busiest ports on the Atlantic
Coast. Huddled at the foot of a long ridge at the mouth of the
Merrimack River, the town was the shipbuilding center of
New England and the hub of the profitable West Indian
trade. From its yards brigs and sloops sailed out to Guade-
loupe and Martinique, and fishing fleets left regularly for the
Grand Banks, returning with cod and pollock for reshipmcnt
to Baltic and Mediterranean ports- Recently citizens of the
town had dredged the harbor and dug a canal linking the
'Port with the lumber country upriver; in 1805 they were
busily reinvesting their profits in local distilleries, tanneries
and iron foundries. On the eve of the renewed war between
France and England, Newburyport enjoyed the benefits of a
neutral trade which flourished as it never did again,

North of the town along the river lay the shipyards, where
master builders turned out the ships that swelled the town's
merchant fleet. To the south toward open sea was "Joppa,"
the village of fisherman's shanties with their racks of salted
cod. But the heart of Newburyport was its waterfront and
commercial houses. Here stood the huge warehouses at the
foot of the docks which looked out on the masts of coasters
and West Indian traders in the harbor.

Just above the docks lay Market Square, from which wide,

NBWBURYPORT BOYHOOD 1 7

elm-shaded streets ran up the rising ground to High Street
and the long ridge that overlooked the town. High Street,
where according to local legend "retired merchants do con-
gregate," was second in prestige only to Salem's Chestnut
Street. Here lived the wealthy merchant families — Jacksons,
Lowells, Tracys and Cusliings — in hip-roofed mansions set
in exotic landscaped gardens. High Street was a world of
Stuart portraits and Adam parlors, dress balls and liveried
footmen. To the newly arrived Garrisons, as to the rest of
the town, it presented the imposing view of a conservative if
not completely closed society of first families who cultivated
the virtues of decorum and good taste in an atmosphere of
cpiet elegance. The opinions of High Street gentlemen were
decidedly Federalist, and in the year 1 805 they continued to
dominate local and state politics, confronting the rest of the
country with the model of rule by the Wise, the Just and the
Good. The future rebel against these Federalist principles of
moderation and good sense grew up in the conservative
stronghold of Essex: County North and began his career as a
defender of the interests and family influence of High Street.
Abijah and Fanny Garrison joined the "middling ranks" of
Newburyport society — as the families on the hill somewhat
patronizingly called them — a class of artisans, mechanics,
small merchants, shopkeepers and clerks. If High Street
cherished the authority of wealth and manners, School Street,
where the Garrisons settled, stood for the homelier values
of piety and integrity* Its aim was not sophistication but
respectability. The High Street families took their pleasure
in soirees and oyster suppers; Abijah and Fanny Garrison's
circle found fellowship in prayer meetings and evening hymn
sings. Although they tended to follow the political direction
of the Federalist coterie and shared its belief in benevolence
and charity, the tradesmen and artisans of Newburyport

1 8 THE LIBERATOR; W^AM>YP OARRISOK

displayed a more strenuous temper and formed a society at
once cruder and more energetic. Abijah dreamed of some-

day joining the carriage set on the hill; his son, possessed of a
more sensitive conscience, would live to reject and finally
condemn that world.

The Garrisons shared the frame house on School Street
with David Farnham, a captain in the coastal trade, and his
wife Martha. With Farnham's help Abijah soon found work,
and "Aunt Martha" became a mainstay of the Garrison house-
hold In the stormy years ahead. She too was a devout Baptist,
and many an evening the parlor was filled with the old hymn
tunes interwoven with discourses on total depravity and the
atoning blood of Christ. With his father so often away from
home, Lloyd — as his mother chose to call him — grew up in
an atmosphere of female piety.

For two years after Lloyd's birth Abijah shipped «is sailing
master aboard coasters and appeared periodically between long
slow voyages to Virginia and the West Indies, meanwhile
sending word of himself in letters that complained of hard
work and poor provisions. Back on shore he found his dream
of domestic bliss shattered and hard luck dogging him once
more. Even as he arrived in Newburyport neutral trade was
already beset with formidable hazards, for both French and
English cruisers were taking heavy toll of American mer-
chantmen, In 1807 Jefferson's Embargo ended the prosperity
which Abijah and his fellow townsmen were beginning to
take for granted. Newburyport plunged Into a depression
from which it never fully recovered. Shipyards and wharves
grew silent, soup kitchens sprang up along the waterfront
as hundreds of seamen suddenly found themselves without
prospects of work. Some of them drifted into the provinces,
but most of them, like Abijah, hung on in Newburyport and

NEWBURYPORT BOYHOOD

joined their employers in open defiance of a policy they be-
lieved intentionally devised to ruin New England,

On the first anniversary of die signing of the Embargo flags
flew at half -mast in the town, and a crowd of seamen, Abijah
among them, marched to the old Customs House to cheer
inflammatory speeches against the administration, Ncwbury-
port took the lead in denouncing the "terrapin" policies of
Virginia's lordlings. In 1808 Massachusetts, following the
example of the town's .Essex Junto, entered a period of out-
right resistance to the national government which lasted until
the return of peace eight years later. Lloyd Garrison's child-
hood years were bitter ones for New England. As the boy
grew older he listened eagerly to High Street explanations
of "Mr. Madison's War" and learned to share the Federalist
gentlemen's mortal hatred of the party of Jefferson.

Meanwhile Abijah's enforced idleness provoked a domestic
crisis. His wife's ways had never been his and a life of church-
going and prayer services depressed him. Without work and
apparently disinclined to find it, he again took refuge in
waterfront taverns where he and his cronies indulged in the
inexpensive pleasures of damning Jefferson and consuming
quantities of local rum. Fanny's muttering only aggravated
the trouble. If she would not tolerate his carousing, he for his
part saw little sense in swapping conviviality for dubious
promises of salvation. In the early summer of 1808 tragedy
struck the household — Caroline, Lloyd's eight-year-old sister,
died suddenly. The birth of another daughter, Maria Elizabeth,
a few weeks later did little to assuage Fanny's grief. When she
gave way to a sudden fit of temper and disrupted one of
Abijah's social evenings at home by breaking the bottles and
forcibly ejecting his companions, her husband had had
enough. He walked out and never returned. Years later he
reappeared on the Sakt John, a loaely schoolteacher telling

20 THE LIBERATOR : %v **:^

his relatives of his "whirl about the world/'9 Bitter and un-
repentant, Fanny seldom mentioned his name again,

With three children and no money, Fanny needed all her
iron determination to keep her family together. But she was
young and strong — her friends said that only a cannon ball
could kill Fanny Garrison, Leaving the children with Aunt
Martha Farnham, she found work as a practical nurse in the
homes of the well-to-do families of the town. Domestic ser-
vice involved a loss of status that stung her pride. In spite of
her professed contempt for the opinions of the world she bit-
terly resented her reduced circumstances. Her relations with
her employers were frequently marred by the injustices, real
or imagined, she felt in working for people more fortunate
than herself. On one occasion she provoked a quarrel with a
Mrs. Gardner, wife of a Salem doctor, to whom she gave a
piece of her mind, "Drawing the picture of a true bred Lady
and a Country ignorant Bred lady who aspired after Dignify
and sunk in impertinence and ostentation [.I I told her for all
she was Dr. G['s] Wife I had seen the clay that I would not
set her with the Dogs of my fathers flock*"10 Fanny would
court no one's favor.

She also worried lest Abijah's weakness appear in his sons
and they too fall into evil ways* Anxiety drove her to domi-
nate them* Only constant vigilance, she believed, could exor-
cise Abijah's curse. "Your good behavior," she wrote to young
Lloyd in one of her endless directives, "will more than com-
pensate for all my troubles; only let me hear that you are
steady and go not in the way of bad company, and my
heart will be lifted up to God for you, that you may be kept
from the snares and temptations of the evil world.'*11

Her control over Lloyd was nearly complete. Only three
years old when his father left home, he easily fell under his
mother's sway and grew up a model child and dutiful son.

NKWBURYPORT BOYHOOD

As companion, teacher and protector of her son Fanny left
an indelible mark on the boy's mind. All his life Garrison
was happiest in the company of women most like his mother,
strong-minded women with repressed maternal instincts. Al-
though lie became a champion of women's rights, the Victo-
rian ideal of the anew woman" remained repugnant to him.
The image of his mother, stern and righteous yet loving and
compassionate, dominated the man just as the real Fanny ruled
his childhood.

With his brother James, who was six years older than
Lloyd and remembered his father well, Fanny had no success.
Resentful of his mother's domination yet dependent on her
love, James ended by making a confused and tragic bid for
independence* The atmosphere in School Street was redolent
with maternal solicitude and soul-searching as Fanny strove
to teach her younger son a Christian asceticism which was
not properly hers. One of the boy's earliest memories was
that of his mother bent in prayer with her "Dear Christian
Friends" in the parlor. Years later, when he abandoned the
church, charging it with sectarian exclusivencss, Garrison
instinctively reverted to the image of this small group of
communicants as embodying the true spirit of Christianity,

Lloyd grew up in extreme poverty; without the help of
devoted friends Fanny Garrison would never have been able
to provide even the necessities for her family- As a man he
always boasted of making his way from obscurity to recogni-
tion "unaided and alone/' and in fact the hardship of these
early years made a lasting impression on him. The child of
five stood on street corners around the town peddling home-
made molasses candy and was often detailed to collect
scraps from the table of aa certain house in State Street,"
trudging back home accompanied by the taunts of playmates*
Although these childhood scenes left no apparent trace of

22 THE LIBERATOR: WJ*^^^^^

bitterness at the time, Garrison was to be greatly impressed
with the power of wealth and position all his life and secretly
vexed by his failure to achieve them. The young boy, how-
ever, inheriting the easy optimism of the Garrisons, con-
fidently assumed that somebody would always look out for
him. Somebody usually did.

In 1 8 10 after a visit with her family in Nova Scotia, Fanny
returned to Newburyport looking for work once again.
Within a year the town was razed by fire and slipped even
further into the doldrums. Soon after this — sometime in
the year 1812— Fanny, taking James with her, moved to
Lynn, where she placed him with a local cordwaincr while
she took a position as housekeeper. Lloyd went to live with
a Newburyport neighbor, Ezekiel Bartlctt, a poor woodcutter
and deacon of the struggling Baptist Church. Here he re-
mained for three years.

Lloyd found life with Deacon Harriett tolerable if lonely*
After the daily chores of splitting and delivering cordwood
to the houses on High Street, he explored the back country
and the waterfront in long solitary excursions. In the sum-
mer there were swimming in the harbor and furtive raids
on the barrels of molasses piled on the wharves; in the winter
he skated on the mall and engaged in snowball skirmishes with
the "Northenders." He was a slight and fragile hoy* small
for his age, and though never intractable, inclined to obstinacy
like his mother. Once he ran away after a quarrel with the
deacon and was finally discovered halfway to Lynn headed
for his mother. For the most part the Bartletts' spartan house-
hold and Fanny's frequent letters of advice ensured his model
behavior. If he received a thorough religious training, he was
less fortunate in acquiring an education. Deacon Bartlett
undertook to provide what he could for his schooling, but

NEWBURYPORT BOYHOOD 2 3

after three months of the luxury of grammar school he was

withdrawn to help his foster parent earn his living,

Fanny disliked Lynn — only "necessity compels me to
stay in it," she admitted. She missed Lloyd, and James was
proving more than a handful In the company of fellow ap-
prentices he had discovered rum. His revolt, like his father's,
began and ended in the grogshop: at the age of fourteen he
was well on the way to becoming an incurable alcoholic.
Fanny, seeing the handiwork of Satan in his misbehavior,
scolded and prayed over him but only succeeded in alienat-
ing him further. James found in blackstrap and the laughter
of wild companions the recognition he craved. "I took a
drink, it was sweet, and from that fatal hour I became a
drunkard." So runs James's confession of his fall from grace.
"I soon got so I could take my glass as often as the master,"
he recalled, "and in a litde while it required double that
quantity to satesfy [sic] my appetite."12 From this point
James's life became one long cycle of drinking bouts, brief
periods of repentance, and the inevitable fall

Fanny never stopped trying to save her older son and
meanwhile tightened her grip on Lloyd. "Q Lloyd," she once
wrote to him, "if I was to hear and have reason to think you
was unsteady, it would break my heart. God forbid! You are
now at an age when you are forming character for life, a
dangerous age. Shun every appearance of evil for the sake of
your soul as well as the body."13 James rebelled against this
compulsive righteousness, but Lloyd, secure in his mother's
absence as well as her love, never felt the need to revolt

With the coming of peace in 1815 Lloyd joined his mother
and brother in Lynn. Soon after he arrived she apprenticed
Mm to a Quaker shoemaker in Market Street, Gamaliel Oliver.
Customers entering Oliver's shop in the year 1815 saw a frail,
undersized boy of tea perched on a high stool and enveloped

24 THE LIBERATOR: WILUAM U..g YP GARRISON

in a huge leather apron, his legs dangling beneath the heavy
kpstone. Lloyd did not take readily to this new regimen.
Pounding the leather into shape and stitching heavy boots
seemed a poor kind of work. He had hardly finished his first
pair of shoes, however, when Fanny packed up the family
and moved to Baltimore, where another Lynn shoemaker* one
Paul Newhall, had decided to establish a factory. Newhall
agreed to hire the boys and board the family at his house, an
arrangement that seemed a godsend to the desperate Fanny.
In the autumn of 1815 the Garrisons sailed from Salem, and
while Fanny busied herself with a nautical journal and the
seasick Lloyd was confined to his cabin, James befriended
the crew and assured himself of a full quota of rum*

No sooner had the family settled in Baltimore than New-
hairs ambitious project collapsed and Fanny took a position
in the home of a local merchant to whom she apprenticed
James. She fought all James's batdes for him and refused
to believe the reports of his frequent misbehavior* His own
stories of ill-treatment at the hands of his employer filled her
with indignation, yet when he brought his friends home, she
lectured them peevishly on the evils of strong drink and
loose living. But James was already a hopeless case. Dis-
satisfied with his job and fed up with his mother's preaching,
he left Baltimore for Frederick, where he tried clerking in
a store, quarreled with the owner, threatened the son with a
knife, and was fired. He crawled back to Baltimore and his
mother, who gave him her last fourteen dollars and a final
lecture. "I promised to do better," James wrote of this last
painful scene, "and left my parent in tears for the wellfare
[sic] of her ruined son, I shall never forget that parting. It
seemed my heart would burst, but I cotdd not shed a ttar/>w
James left for Lynn with the intention of retormng to the
shoe trade, but within a few years quit his work and went to

NKWBURYPORT BOYHOOD 25

sea. Lloyd did not meet him again until twenty-five years
later when, worn out by drinking and a life of debauchery,
James came home to die.

Garrison remembered little of this period of his life. The
darkly romantic Baltimore of slave coffles and whipping posts
was the product of his life there fifteen years later. The boy
of ten was closely supervised by his mother and seldom strayed
beyond her view. Life with the exacting Fanny must have
been difficult, for he thought of nothing but returning to
"Uncle BartlettV "He is so discontented," complained
Fanny to Martha Farnham, "that he would leave me to-
morrow and go with strangers to N.P.; he can't mention any
of you without tears,"15 Reluctantly she submitted to his
pleas to rejoin the Bartletts' and go back to school. In the
summer of 1816 he was back in Newburyport for what
proved to be the last of his formal education in the local
grammar school As a young newspaperman. Garrison ad-
mitted to a "very inferior education" and complained that
he did not know "one single rule of grammar/'16 His reading
at this time consisted of such sermons and religious tracts as
the pious deacon could afford; his social life was confined to
the children's singing school and Sunday pilgrimages to
church*

The problem of placing him in a trade became more ur-
gent when Fanny's health suddenly failed and she realized
that soon she would be wholly dependent on her younger
son. Finding a position to his liking was not easy. He flatly
refused to clerk in a store and explained that without capital
he could never set up for himself* Hopefully Fanny and
Deacon Bardett apprenticed him to a Haverhill cabinetmaker,
but at the end of sk weeks, lonely and unhappy, Lloyd ran
away. Despairing of teaching the headstrong youngster a
trade he clearly disliked, his master released him. Then the

26 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM IXOYD

deacon noticed an advertisement of a position with the
buryport Herald, and Lloyd dutifully applied* The editor,
Ephraim W, Allen, took an immediate liking to the keen hut
stubborn boy, and on October 18, 1818, Lloyd was ap-
prenticed to Allen for the term of seven years. Garrison never
tired of affirming the providential nature of his choice, which
put into his hands "the great instrumentalities for the final
overthrow of the slave system, . . . Had I not been a prac-
tical printer — an expert compositor and able to work at the
press — there would have been no Liberator."17 Divine pres-
ence aside, his real education had begun.

The Young Conservative

FROM 1818 to 1825 Lloyd Garrison went to school to New
England conservatism in the offices of the Newburyport
Herald and graduated an expert printer and a loyal Federalist,
Along with a mastery of the mechanics of printing he ac-
quired principles and prejudices which he kept all his life.

The printing trade fascinated the thirteen-year-old boy
from the beginning. So small at first that he had to perch on
top of a fifty-six-pound weight to reach the compositor's
box, he nevertheless learned easily, and it was not long before
he could handle the composing stick better than any of Allen's
apprentices. The editor taught him the importance of clean
copy, and soon he could set a thousand ems an hour without
a mistake.

He boarded with his employer. Editor Allen, recognizing
the boy's voracious appetite for learning, fed it as best he
could, Lloyd read constantly and indiscriminately — Shake-
speare and the sentimental novelists, Pope, Byron, the Waverly
novels and Mrs. Felicia Hemans, and the polemics of Federal-
ist scribblers. The Herald office opened a new world of poli-
tics and literature to the young apprentice, who began to
dream of entering that world as a man of letters in his own
right* Under Allen's tutelage he developed a keen interest in
the management of the paper aid the Federalist politicians

28 THEL^^

of the town. Midway in his apprenticeship, when Lloyd was
seventeen, Allen advanced him to shop foreman with the
responsibility for making up the paper,

Lloyd found his friends among the other apprentices in
Newburyport, poor boys like himself who could not afford
an education and approached the business of self-improvement
in deadly earnest. His closest friend was William (Joss
Crocker, an ardent Baptist and later a missionary to Liberia.
Toby Miller was working at the Herald to earn his tuition
at Andover Seminary. Isaac Knapp, another member of the
circle, was a companionable but ineffectual young man who
also hungered for fame. He and Lloyd became fast friends
and eventual partners in the Liberator. The liveliest of
Lloyd's acquaintances was Thomas Bennett, an adventurer and
amateur classicist who was preparing a translation of Cicero's
orations.

Along with these friends Lloyd accepted the narrowing
horizons of Newburyport, He joined the franklin Club, a
local debating society, and spent evenings arguing whether
mixed dancing injured the morals of young females or whether
democracy fostered the arts. The friends met regularly in a
room over Oilman's bookstore to read poetry and compose
pale imitations of the saccharine verses of Mrs* Hcmans.
Lloyd attended church regularly and sang in the choir*
Although he never became a member, he delighted in weighty
sermons, studied the Bible and pondered the doctrines of
plenary inspiration and the second blessing. He was nearly
the "complete Baptist" his mother had predicted* a "devout
legalist" with all the orthodox persuasions*

To his friends he seemed something of a prig* for they
found his uncommon gravity amusing. "He was an exceed-
ingly genteel young man," one of them remembered, "always
neatly, and perhaps I might say elegantly dressed, and m

THE YOUNG CONSERVATIVE 29

good taste, and was quite popular with the ladies."1 Another
recalled him as a "handsome and attractive youth, unusually
dignified in his bearing for so young a man."2 Already he saw
himself as a man of probity, Oblivious to the charges of
prudery, he fashioned an image of the young man of senti-
ment to whom all things mattered deeply. In time this image
grew into a public role which he learned to play with con-
summate skill. The Garrisonian myth sprang from this care-
fully cultivated notion of himself which the eighteen-year-old
apprentice offered to his friends — the figure of the true
Christian gentleman who is in but not of the world. It was
not just a pose; Lloyd was self-righteous but he was not a
hypocrite. Despite his apparent freedom he was still his
mother's son raised on her twin convictions that virtue is
its own reward and that piety is the final test of character.
Fanny Garrison bequeathed to her son an obsession with
purity and her own secret craving for power and respect.
Like her he thirsted for recognition — he would be admired,
though for what he did not yet know. But it was wrong, he
suspected, not to take life seriously, and this meant first of all
being serious with oneself. Once he found a cause he would
have fame soon enough. Meanwhile he wore the look of
dedication that puzzled his friends as they wondered just
what it was he sought

After the return of peace with England the Newburyport
Herald continued to offer its readers the same wholesome
Federalist fare it had supplied for twenty years. As the organ
of the party in Essex County North it had changed litde
since the days when its first editor lauded the "free and
valuable'* administration of John Adams* Ephraim Allen had
arrived in town about the turn of the century and during
New England's long night of opposition to the Virginia dy-
nasty had served the cause faithfully with jeremiads on

3° ™E LIBERATOR : WXL^AM^

democracy and appeals to the good sense of propertied gentle-
men. When Lloyd Garrison entered his office in 1818, Allen
was still busy trying to rejuvenate a moribund Federalism that
had barely survived the Hartford Convention, In this un-
rewarding work he soon had occasion to enlist the editorial
talents of his apprentice.

Young Garrison's education was no mere flirtation with
the spirit of conservatism but a thorough indoctrination in
Federalist legend and lore. The files of the Herald held a
whole library of party history, from the secessionist schemes
of Timothy Pickering to the ill-fated deliberations of the
Hartford Convention. All the spoils of a thirty-year war of
words lay at Lloyd's fingertips. He studied the dire prophe-
cies of Fisher Ames, lingered over the oratorical flourishes
of Harrison Gray Otis, relished the caustic phrases of Timothy
Pickering, and thrilled to the harangues of free-swinging
Federalist editors of an earlier day. The epic of New Eng-
land's straggle against Democracy and Infidelity was charged
with all the drama and suspense, the histrionics and the pag-
eantry needed to capture the loyalty of a high-principled
young blood. From these Federalist stalwarts Lloyd (earned
both the art of dramaturgy and the difficult science of fight-
ing impossible odds.

The archpriest of Federalist journalism was Benjamin Run-
sell, who in announcing the advent of a new "era of good
feeEngs" in 1815 admitted only to the willingness of Mas-
sachusetts to forgive an errant Republic its mistakes* In thus
proclaiming the magnanimity of New England* Russell put
the official Federalist seal on the trace with die rest of the
country as well as on the party's admission of defeat* Re-
pudiated at the polls again in 181:6, the spirit of Federalism
retired to the chill libraries of Essex County mansions where
elderly admirers of Timothy Pickering reminisced over the

THE YOUNG CONSERVATIVE 31

lost greatness of the Junto. As he read the partisan accounts
of the battles against democracy, Lloyd Garrison concluded
that Federalism still lived. What the party needed, he con-
vinced himself, was a new editor cut to the pattern of Benja-
min Russell, whose hammer-like blows struck sparks of truth.
Who knew but that someday Russell's mantle might fall on
him? It was a dream worth cultivating. While New England
joined the rest of the country in opening the New West,
Lloyd turned back to the lost engagements of Federalist his-
tory and learned his lessons so well that soon he could recall
with the best of High Street gentlemen the evil days when
"the ghost of democracy stalked through our towns, carrying
desolation and death to the rights and liberties of the people."3

Newburyport had been the home of Federalism even before
John Adams coined the term Essex Junto for its knot of dis-
contented and obstinate conservatives. Not many cities on
the seaboard could match its roster of distinguished Federalists
-* Congressmen Thcophihis Parsons, Stephen Higginson, and
Tristram Dalton, Judge John Lowell, and the merchant
princes Jonathan Jackson and Nathaniel Tracy. Joined to
Salern's Chestnut Street and Boston's State Street, the elm-
shaded walks along High Street formed the backbone of
Massachusetts Federalism. Boston boasted of the wealth of
newly arrived Essex County 6migr6$, but Newburyport and
Salem, where aristocratic discontent cooled the Indian summer
of the party, were the real centers of conservative opinion in
America*

In the Federalist view the future of the country ky not in
the West with its wild notions of equality and license but in
settled coastal villages like Newburyport where people lived
sober and decent lives. To aid them in their struggle against
the New West the New England Federalists invoked a myth
as old as John Wkthrop's City on a HiU — the myth of New

32 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD CARRLSON

England's mission to civilize the wilderness. The New Eng-
land mission, preached by politicians and clergymen alike,
reinforced a sectional pride that lived on after the death of
the Federalist Party into a new age when the slavery contro-
versy gave it the appearance of fact.

This faith in the peculiar destiny of New England was the
intellectual heritage of Lloyd Garrison. He came to believe
in the superiority of his section as firmly as in the stern God
of the Baptists. In Fisher Ames and Timothy Pickering he
discovered the naturally appointed leaders of the nation. As
he studied the history of the secessionist movement in New
England it seemed to him that never had Massachusetts been
so glorious as when, outmaneuvered by a hostile administra-
tion, she refused to support an unjust war and retreated into
splendid isolation. The lofty ideals in which the Junto enve-
loped their plots seized the imagination of the budding
Federalist. In 1845, at the height of the slavery controversy in
Massachusetts, he would argue for separation from the Union
in terms which were essentially those of his spiritual guide
and mentor, Timothy Pickering.

As the captain of New England secessionism Pickering
always identified his cause with righteousness. "I am dis-
gusted with the men who now rule and with their measures/*
he wrote to Rufus King in 1804* ". * . I am therefore ready
to say 'Come out from among them, and be ye separate** "*
When corruption, he went on, was the object and instrument
of the President and the tendency of his administration, what
was left but to withdraw? Pickering foresaw nothing but
peace and harmony resulting from secession. The South
would need the naval protection of the North, which in turn
would require agricultural products from the Southern Con-
federacy. Pickering's real reasons for advocating secession,
however, were political "I believe, indeed," he argued with

TOE YOUNG CONSERVATIVE 33

the precise logic of the unworldly, "that, if a Northern con-
federacy were forming, our Southern brethren would be
seriously alarmed, and probably abandon their virulent meas-

ures."8

Forty years later Garrison proposed Northern secession in
almost identical terms. He never read Pickering's correspond-
ence and would have denied the similarity of their arguments.
The parallel is nonetheless striking. As a self-appointed judge
of American life, Pickering displayed the same unbending
rectitude and disregard of consequences that marked Garri-
son's anti-slavery views. Pickering, to be sure, expressed no
very strong opinions on slavery — his opposition to the system
extended no further than an objection to the three-fifths
clause. In 1812 he was perfectly willing to unite with South-
ern slaveholders in detaching the West. In pursuing his
version of truth he was no more consistent than Garrison.
Pickering would have abhorred the doctrines of the Liberator •,
and Garrison lived to disown both the Revolutionary genera-
tion of which Pickering was a member and the Constitution
he helped to ratify. Yet both men, each in his own time, tried
to capture the revolutionary tradition, the first in, defense of
minority privilege, the other in support of human rights.

Only as the last-ditch stand of a repressed minority can
New England Federalism and Garrisonian abolitionism be
compared. Still, Pickering's plots contained the ingredients
for martyrdom as his pupil was quick to see. There was just
enough tenacity in young Garrison for him to recognize his
hero's dedication and reckless determination. Narrow and
pharLsaical Pickering certainly was, but when he stood forth
as the champion of sectional interests in the face of national
hostility, he appeared the personification of virtue, a man of
"unsullied reputation*"0 It was no coincidence that Lloyd
Garrison made his debut on the political stage in the role

34 _ THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM

of a young Galahad rescuing a languishing Federalism and
burnishing the tarnished reputation of its spokesman.

Lloyd noticed as he worked at the compositor's desk that
most of the communications from readers that crossed Allen's

desk eventually found their way into print. A perennial
source of native American humor and no doubt a favorite
topic in the Franklin Club was the blessings of bachelorhood,
Lloyd made his first appearance in print at the age of eighteen
in a letter defending this time-honored institution and warn-
ing against "Hymen's silken chains" and brawling and con-
tentious females.7

From domestic tyranny, "An Old Bachelor/1 as he styled
himself, turned to adventure — a fictional account of a ship-
wreck less significant for its complete ignorance of nautical
matters than for its unconscious religious and sexual symbol-
ism. Sailing from Bermuda to Liverpool, the narrator is
awakened in the middle of the night by a crash which "pre-
cipitated me out of my birth [sic] against the opposite side
of the room." Groping his way to the deck, he finds that the
vessel has struck a reef and "bilged." Quickly he clambers
into a Hfeboat filled with the members of the crew and pushes
off into the storm. There is a terrifying glare of lightning,
but a dead silence surrounds the lifeboat. Suddenly a giant
wave swamps the fragile longboat, and the narrator, "being
an expert swimmer," seizes an par and strikes off alone*

I heard the groans of my expiring companions re-echo over the

vast expanse of waters, fainter and more faint, and then - all was
silent! An awful and most horrible stillness reigned: 1 murmured

agaiast that Providence who had so wonderfully preserved my
life before — it was a moment of despair; — I thought, or fancied
I thought, that one of my dying companions was grasping me
with the strength of a giant, and endeavoring to draw me under

THE YOUNG CONSERVATIVE 35

with him — or that some terrible monster of the deep was swallow-
ing me tip in his terrific jaws — a cold trfemor pervaded my whole
frame — my head grew dizzy, and my senses were completely
worked up to a frenzy — I uttered a piercing shriek, and swooned

away.

He awakes to find himself miraculously cast up oa a
sandy beach with his oar "grasped firmly" in his hands-8

This thinly disguised drama of salvation prefigures die pat-
tern of Garrison's adult life. The anxiety and self-alienation,
the overwhelming sense of guilt and total reliance on God's
grace disclose a personality less concerned with the claims of
people than with the awesome commands of a father. Like
his narrator in the tale, Garrison would be ready to abandon
his comrades in his struggle for salvation. Already Fanny
Garrison's convictions were hardening into a protective au-
thoritarianism over the insecurity of her eighteen-year-old
son.

With pardonable pride Lloyd wrote to his mother of his
astonishment uat the different subjects which I have discussed,
and the style in which they are written." He assured her that
he was successfully cultivating "the seeds of improvement"
and developing his intellectual powers.9 In fact, his was a
mediocre literary talent. He lacked a feeling for the sound
and shape of words as well as a natural sense of rhythm. As
he modeled his work on the accepted journalistic style of the
day he came to depend on an Addisonian rhetoric that al-
ways shackled his prose. James Russell Lowell once observed
that there is death in the dictionary, that true vigor does not
pass from page to page, but from man to man. It is just this
absence of human contact that mars Garrison's mature style.
At best in a handful of Liberator editorials his words, though
inspired by passion, are rhetorical and impersonal. More often

36 THE LIBERATOR: W'LJJAMJU^OTO

they are simply turgid and monotonous. These youthful at-
tempts, like so much of his later writing, betray the failure
of feeling in a shallow and unimaginative mind. They may
have kept him from wasting time, as he told his mother, "in
that dull, senseless, insipid manner which generally character-
izes giddy youths," but they hardly justified the "signal
success17 he claimed for them with readers of the Herald.

Lloyd's obvious need for new ideas was supplied by Caleb
Gushing, whose return to Newburyport in 1821 helped widen
his young friend's intellectual horizons. Gushing was the
son of a wealthy local merchant and a recent graduate of
Harvard, where first as a student and then as a tutor he had
discussed politics with Harvard's young scholars, George
Bancroft, Jared Sparks, and Edward Everett, He had even
written an article for Everett's North American R&ui&w de-
nouncing slavery, which he traced to prejudices of the whites
"with regard to the minds of the blacks whom we desired to
believe incapable of elevation, order and improvement/*10
He condemned slavery as unchristian and unrealistic but added
significantly that emancipation posed insoluble problems. In
1821 Gushing came home to practice law as a first step toward
entering politics. Cosmopolitan and urbane, he brought a
new tone to the Herald, whose staff he joined first on a part-
time basis and then, in Allen's absence, as temporary editor,

It was Gushing who first called young Garrison's attention
to slavery. To be sure, New England had disapproved of the
institution ever since the Revolution, and for years the three-
fifths clause of the Constitution had been a stormy issue in
Congress and the subject of much debate back home* A
serious student of Federalism like Lloyd could hardly have
avoided the pronouncements of his heroes on the evils of
slavery. Even the Herald carried occasional accounts of aboli-
tion in England and news of the American Colonizadon

THE YOUNG CONSERVATIVE 37

Society. From his mother he had learned that slavery and
true Christian spirit were incompatible. During a nearly fatal
attack of consumption Fanny wrote him of her colored nurse,
"so kind no one can tell how kind she is, and although a
Slave to Man, yet a freeborn soul, by the Grace of God."11
This Lloyd knew well enough, but absorbed in the fascinat-
ing business of acquiring a reputation, he did not regard
slavery as a serious problem until Gushing opened his eyes.
Cushing's scruples mirrored the confusion of a growing
opinion in New England that condemned slavery in the ab-
stract but hesitated for political reasons to meddle with it.

Slavery was not the only topic which Lloyd discussed with
his new friend. Gushing lent him books and urged him to
undertake other challenging subjects. Revolutions in South
America, rebellions in Greece, uprisings in Verona and Naples
all seemed to forecast the eventual triumph of the people over
the forces of reaction and repression, Lloyd's investigation of
the South American revolts led him to denounce American
foreign policy in ringing tones. If the new republics could not
rid themselves of "the dross of superstition and tyranny" on
their own, they must be taught to enforce justice and pay
due respect to the American flag. Coercion held the answer,
"The only expedient to command respect and protect our
citizens will be to finish with the cannon what cannot be done
in a conciliatory manner, where justice demands such pro-
ceedings.**w The appeal to force came easily to young Garri-
son, Christian nonresistance lay far in the future, a cause to
be fervently embraced until war promised to accomplish what
moral suasion alone could not* Forty years later Garrison
would return to this youthful conviction that since the right
is mighty, one must not cavil at the just use of. force,

In 18x3 Massachusetts Federalists chose Harrison Gray
Otis as their candidate for governor* The campaign of one

38 THE LIBERATOR:

of his heroes gave Lloyd his first real chance to defend the

principles of Federalism and the reputation of an idol which
had been severely damaged by the Hartford Convention.
A new cause recpired a new nom de plume. On March 14,
1823, the Herald ran the first of a series of letters signed "One
of the People'7 extolling the "superior intellect" of 1 Harrison
Gray Otis and the Federalists. Otis may have been Lloyd's
ideal statesman, but as a gubernatorial candidate he proved
a distinct liability. Unable to explain the "deep lethargy" into
which the Federalist Party had fallen, Lloyd prepared for
the worst by warning of the "tremendous evikn that would
accompany Otis's probable defeat*

„ . . then it is that we are forced, however reluctantly, to cast
back our recollections to those destructive measures which were
adopted by our oponents by which the liberties of our people
were hazarded with impunity, as the friendly beacon for every
true Federal Republican to remain in the course he has strictly
pursued, which carries him safe from the shoals of delusion, upon
which his enemies are wrecked*13

Delusion prevailed: Otis carried Newbnryport but lost

Essex County and the rest of the state. "One of the People1*
retired into editorial limbo*

These early editorials evidence more passion than political
acumen* Slowly the young man was mastering the difficult
art of avoiding argument Temperamentally unfitted for the
work of logical exposition, he simply was not happy with
ideas. His effectiveness as a Federalist propagandist and later
as an anti-slavery agitator depended less on an analysis than
a total disregard of other people's ideas. Already he disdained
to treat his adversaries seriously: convinced that only malice
could explain the wanton attacks on Otis, he refused to in-

THE YOUNG CONSERVATIVE 39

vcstigate them. This studied contempt for his opponents
furnishes the key to his peculiar use of language. Beneath the
invective and the vituperation lay a belief in the moral de-
pravity of those who disagreed with him. He accepted the
Federalist myth at face value — to him the Republicans really
were a "turbulent faction" rallying around a "rebellious
standard." Violence to fact troubled the neophyte Federalist
no more than it did the abolitionist editor. Even now he viewed
the American political scene as the stage for a morality play
and politicians as Bunyanesque symbols of good and evil.
These editorial experiments written with a conviction worthy
of a better cause show the hardening mind of a zealot.

By the summer of 1823 Fanny Garrison was dying of con-
sumption and longed to see her younger son once more.
Reluctantly he agreed to come to Baltimore since he disliked
leaving home just when he was becoming a success. His
determination to become an author stiffened his mother's
resistance. "You have no doubt read," she warned him in a
last letter before his arrival, "of the fate of such characters,
that they generally starve to death in some garret or place
that no one inhabits; so you may see what fortune and luck
belong to you if you are of that class of people/'14 Lloyd
found her weak and bedridden and was strangely moved by
their reunion. "You must imagine my sensations/* he wrote
to Allen, "on beholding a dearly loved mother, after an
absence of seven years* I found her in tears — but O God, so
altered, so emaciated, that I should never have recognized her,
had I not known there was none else in the room,"15 Early
in September, 1823, Fanay died, and after attending to her
burial Lloyd returned to Newburyport.

It was not to the solaces of his mother's religion that Lloyd
turned in the next year but to the forthcoming presidential
election. Nowhere did the tides of partisan political feeling

40 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

run higher in the spring and summer of 1824 than in Essex
County, where diehard members of the old Junto plotted to
sabotage the campaign of John Quincy Adams, that "rank
apostate" from true Federalism, and throw the state to
William H. Crawford. As the campaign neared its climax
Garrison, now an open champion of Pickering and the Junto,
deserted the columns of the Herald for those of the Salem
Gazette to lambaste Adams and loudly proclaim the little-
known merits of Crawford. With the first of a series of edi-
torials entitled "The Crisis" and signed "Aristides" he was
back in the political arena again offering his dubious talents
in the service of another lost cause,

In Crawford, he discovered the son of a humble farmer
struggling against the adversities of life; in Adams, the son
of an ex-President rolling in wealth and supported by his sire's
popularity. Scarcely more accurate was his characterization
of Andrew Jackson, who by the late summer had begun to
outdistance his rivals. Open letters to Jackson from irate
Federalists flooded the New England press, and Garrison, not
to be outdone, devoted two columns to apprising the general
of his unfitness for the exacting duties of public office* Jack-
son, he warned, possessed the "savage and domineering spirit"
of one "born and bred up in the field." As for the people —
the same electorate presumably intelligent enough to elect
Crawford — they were not to be trusted. Here speaks the
true Federalist:

Sir, republics are always in danger; aspiring and designing men

can easily cheaply purchase the tools of faction, to consummate
their wishes. The views of the people, however pure and upright
they may first be, are nevertheless shuffling and fickle when the*se
insidious agents are let loose upon the community* Flattery

THE YOUNG CONSERVATIVE 41

judiciously disposed, can lull them into the by-paths of error, and
prejudice will warp and mislead them.16

With a final warning to the freemen of Massachusetts to
look to their liberties and elect Crawford, "Aristides" retired
from the conflict, Massachusetts guarded her freedom by
voting solidly for John Quincy Adams. To all but the credu-
lous Lloyd Garrison it was clear that the Federalist Party
was dead. lie would make one last attempt to raise the
spirit of conservatism before joining the ranks of Adams's
supporters in 1828. By then he was four years too late.

The year 1825 saw Lloyd back on the Herald for his last
year of apprenticeship. His life for the next twelve months
was uneventful, for Newburyport still slumbered untouched
by the currents of reform that were gathering in New York
and the Ohio Valley. The Franklin Club met regularly, and
he rehearsed his speeches in the solitude of the local cemetery,
practicing for the time when he could deliver his maiden
political address. His appetite for literature involved him in a
heated exchange with John Neal, the Yankee humorist, in
the first round of an editorial scrap which lasted for years.
Neal surveyed the American literary scene for the readers
of Bhckrwood')$ and pronounced it a barren waste. His dis-
missal of such worthies as Joel Barlow and Thomas Fessenden
brought Garrison charging to their defense in a long and
belligerent essay in which he dismissed Neal as a madman
"fitter to be confined for real downright insanity and clothed
in a straight jacket, than obtruding his pestiferous productions
upon the public."17 America, he admitted, still required the
finishing hand of time, but there was a rich harvest of fame
shortly to be gathered in. Fie might have added that he meant
to share in that harvest

Lloyd celebrated his twentieth birthday with the end of his

41 __ THE LIBERATOR: WILtlAM

apprenticeship. His had been an education in sentiment: he had
learned to pay lip service to the conservative principles of
Federalism though as yet he scarcely understood them. What
appealed to him most was the romantic spirit of revolt in the
last stand of the old seaboard aristocracy. The fact that
Pickering's rebellion had been a war of revenge, that the
Junto acted from personal hatred only added the color of
personalities to a moral issue. High-mindcdness and self-
deception make an inflammable mixture. In time the seces-
sionist impulse of the Federalists fused with the most temperate
of social philosophies would produce that peculiar com-
pound which another generation called "Garrisonism." For all
their bellicose spirit, however, these editorial experiments
were the work of a fledgling reformer still casting about for a
cause.

In December, 1825, Garrison left the Herald. More than
anything else now he wanted a newspaper of his own and a
chance to be a force outside politics. He knew that words
would be his means to power and that he could manipulate
them to make himself the fearless crusader he wanted to be
— they were his instruments for transforming a private vision
into a public role. Three months after leaving the Herald
he had established himself as sole owner, editor and printer
of the Newburyport Free Press*

AUen, advanced him the money for his venture, which
turned out to be a poor risk. The small-town newspaper at
this time served as the handmaiden of the politician and
shared his fate when the election returns came in* Sk months
before an important national election local party members
would rent a room, hire an editor on a one-year contr&cr,
and buy a press with just enough type to print a serviceable
party bulletin. After the election, depending on the
of their candidate, they might continue the sheet as a party

THE YOUNG CONSERVATIVE 43

organ or sell it to the next adventurer for a song. The latter
was the case with the Free Press, or Northern Chronicler, as
it was originally called by the Jacksonian clique which
founded it in 1824. The next year they sold it to Isaac Knapp,
Lloyd Garrison's earnest friend; but Knapp had neither a
nose for news nor a head for figures, and six months of
struggling with his creditors convinced him that the town
could not or would not support two newspapers. Accord-
ingly, on March 16, 1826, he announced his retirement for
reasons of health and the transfer of his paper to "MR.
WILLIAM L. GARRISON, a young gentleman who possesses a
thorough knowledge of the business, and of known talent
and integrity."18 It took the new owner just six months to
realize he had made a bad bargain.

To set his paper on the proper course Garrison rechristened
it the Free Press, a title, he explained, "sonorous and politically
more appropriate.'*^ In the very first issue he announced his
independence of all parties and factions. Readers' doubts as to
the new editor's political views, however, were quickly dis-
pelled when they discovered on the masthead the old Federal-
ist slogan Onr Country — Our Whole Country — And Noth-
ing But Our Country, There could be no doubt as to which
was the side of the angels: the Free Press trumpeted its
editor's militant Federalism.

Now an enterprising young man stepping into the political
scene in 1826 might have ensured his own future and that of
his newspaper in one of two ways. He could offer Ms ser-
vices to the followers of John Quincy Adams or he could
join the liberal insurgents in the administration party who
were chafing under the leadership of Boston "nabobs'' and
contemplating a new political party. In all the confusion of
shif ting party alignments one fact was clear — the old Federal-
ist Party was dead. To ignore its demise was to indulge in

44

THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

fantasies; to attempt to perpetuate the ideals and aspirations
of the Essex Junto was to court political suicide. Yet Lloyd
Garrison, neglecting the example of wiser men, determined
to hold fast to the spirit of Fisher Ames, lie would rake the
ashes of sectionalism until, phoenix-like, the Party of the
Wise and the Good rose again in all its pristine glory.

He opened his revival by presenting Massachusetts* war
claims to the national government, a shopworn Federalist
article that had been retailed without success in Washington
for ten years. The Old Colony, he admitted, would no longer
threaten secession; but it was folly to deny that her confi-
dence had been weakened — "that her faith in the integrity
of government has become speculative; that her rights have
been invaded; and, finally, that she feels deeply and sensibly
the glaring insult to her character."*0 The citizens of New-
buryport expressed their indifference to the question of their
integrity by canceling their subscriptions. In three weeks*
time he had purged his list of all but a few stanch Federalists,
Undismayed by this wholesale desertion, he fired off an
editorial at the defectors accusing them of plotting against
freedom of the press* "The gag shall be applied only when
we are helpless," he declared.21

His editorials showed only a meager understanding of
American politics* With his propensity for hero-worship he
idealized the system as a machine originally designed to
produce the great man but badly operated by scheming
politicians for their own corrupt purposes. Compromise —
politics as the art of the possible — he could not understand*
The more he studied politics the more convinced he became
of its utter wrongfulness. There was something vicious about
backstairs conferences, secret bargains and haggling over
votes. Even party organization seemed sinister. Political
decisions, he felt, ought to be made openly in public view by

THE YOUNG CONSERVATIVE 45

upright men with correct principles, and parties should func-
tion as open markets for moral axioms. In the public arena,
in full view of the citizenry, the great man would emerge and,
using the force of his superior judgment, rise to immediate
leadership. The fate of American democracy, he concluded,
hinged on its use of such leadership.

Garrison distrusted politics not simply because he feared
power but because he wanted it. Although he showed few
of the outward signs of a child of adversity, he hungered
for recognition. His father had been a ne'er-do-well. He had
a drunkard for a brother. His mother had died an abandoned
and bitter woman. He had been denied an education and a
chance to enter a profession. If it took perseverance to make
himself known, he had plenty of that. As he looked about
him at the giants of New England — Daniel Webster, Harri-
son Gray Otis, Lyman Beecher — he gathered that character
was the key to success. All of his idols were public figures
with powerful personalities that lifted them above the crowd.
Webster's beetled brows and flashing eyes matched the
thunderous tones of his speeches and lent personal force to
the grandeur of his American dream. Lyman Beecher, the
emblem of Puritan righteousness, hammered his pulpit as if it
were an anvil striking sparks of divine zeal Harrison Gray
Otis, another of the New England titans, also used the spoken
word to advertise his genius. All three of Garrison's heroes
were spellbinders who inspired awe by the sheer force of their
personalities. It seemed to him that the secret of their power
lay in a union of virtue and strength. Ironically, all three
would soon disillusion him by disclosing the very lack of
moral fiber he credited them with. Meanwhile the editor
of the Free Press decided to follow their example and cast
himself into a role which would give full play to his driving
ambition.

THE LIBERATOR:

Thus personalities rather than politics determined the
course of the Free Press. Without a sturdy political platform

Garrison could only stand on the conviction that controversy
would sell newspapers and earn him a reputation as a crusader
for truth. He perfected a high moral tone and studied abuse,
dubbing Henry Clay "our immaculate Secretary of State**
and William B. Giles a "jewel in the tarnished crown of
the Old Dominion." Rival editors he dismissed as political
brawlers and mountebanks, political opponents as insignifi-
cant politicians with paltry artifices. Soon this calculated
belligerence provoked a quarrel, and significantly, his first
editorial dispute involved his benefactor and now rival editor,
Ephraim Allen*

When Jefferson and Adams died on the fiftieth anniversary
of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Allen
treated his readers to a panegyric. Garrison decided to catch
his former employer out. The editor of the Herald 9 he com-
plained, was guilty of indecorum and language both rhapsodi-
cal and offensive, since everyone knew that Jefferson's deist
views inculcated a loose morality. Allen countered with a
reminder of his rival's youth and inexperience and recom-
mended a more charitable tone. This "mock dignity1* was
too much for the thin-skinned Garrison, who let loose a volley
of invective at Allen:

He has flattered himself too highly to imagine that we are am-
bitious of breaking a lance with him. We shall look for a better
antagonist Here, the victory would not be the equivalent to our

condescension. — We disclaim having made, at the beginning, any
^attack' — he alone has provoked it But in our plenitude, we have
already been too prodigal of favors. Every word, which we have
bestowed upon the caterer for the Herald, has conic from m with

THE YOUNG CONSERVATIVE 47

the same reluctance that we should sacrifice so many U.S. Bank-
notes. He has therefore the sum of our generosity.22

If he hazarded Allen's friendship in his haste to get ahead,

he gained two new friends at this time in John Greenleaf

Whittier and William Ladd. Whittier and Ladd were har-
bingers of a season of Christian reform that came to New-
buryport in the spring of 1826. They represented a kind of
religious zeal which was new to Garrison, and their ideas
led him to the doorstep of the evangelical reform movement.
The story of his discovery of Whittier and his part in estab-
lishing him as a poet was one Garrison never tired of telling.

One morning in the late spring of 1826 he entered his office
to find slipped under the door a letter from HaverhiU written
in violet ink in a spidery feminine hand. Enclosed he found
a poem, "The Exile's Departure," signed "W," which Whit-
tier's eighteen-year-old sister had secretly copied and sent to
Garrison for his comments. Garrison fancied himself a critic
of discernment as well as a poet, and he took great pride
in the literary column of his paper. His aesthetic creed, drawn
from the precepts of New England thcocrats, was both rigid
and narrow. He demanded subjects selected with "skill and
judgment," poetic themes spotlessly pure, "lofty emotion"
and "deep pathos," verse heavily freighted with "that darling
figure," personification. The reigning queen, of Garrison's
world of fancy was Mrs, Felicia Hemans, that "wonderful and
extraordinary woman," whose syrupy concoctions blended
chaste passion and female virtue in just the right proportions.
He commended her works to his readers with the assurance
that they would find them "pure as the cloudless skies of an
Italian summer/' Whittier's poem, which drew heavily on this
sentimental tradition, met every test in the Garrisonian canon*
He printed it in his next issue accompanied by the following

43 THE k*BERAT°K| J^

Invitation: "If *W/ at Haverhill, will continue to favor us
with pieces beautiful as the one inserted in our poetical depart-
ment for to-day, we shall esteem it a favor."23

Once he learned the young poet's identity, he wanted to
meet him. He hired a buggy and, accompanied by a young
lady, drove to the Whittier farm and introduced himself.
Whittier, he remembered, entered the parlor "with shrinking
diffidence, almost unable to speak, and blushing like a
maiden."24 Warming to his role of patron, Garrison gave him
fatherly encouragement and lectured his parents on the need
to cultivate genius. "We endeavored to speak chceringly of
the prospects of their son," he later explained, "we dwelt upon
the impolicy of warring against nature, of striving to quench
the first kindlings of a flame which might bum like a star in
our literary horizon — and we spoke too of fame." Whatever
the effects of this harangue on the taciturn John Whittier,
his son responded to Garrison's encouragement by sending
him sixteen more poems, all of which he published*

Whittier set Garrison thinking. In these poems Whittier
was beginning to give artistic form to his Quaker beliefs.
The poems developed the themes of the inner light, renuncia-
tion of pride, and service to Christ, not as mystical visions
of another world but as practical guides to action* This piety
and quiet intensity challenged Garrison to examine his ideas*
Whittier's faith in the goodness of men — his passionate con-
viction that God dwells in every soul — conflicted sharply
with Garrison's orthodox persuasions. Fanny Garrison's God
had been a stern and righteous judge of human sin, and her
son grew to manhood secure in the belief in innate depravity
and original sin, the atoning blood of Christ, and the divinity
of the Sabbath, His conservative political bias was reinforced
by the conviction acquired from the New England clergy
that only the moral force of orthodoxy could save a demo-

THE YOUNG CONSERVATIVE 49

cratic people from drifting into atheism and degeneracy.
The Free Press joined in denouncing the cardinal American
sins of Sabbath-breaking, free thought, dueling, prostitution,
theater-going, and tippling. By the time he met Whittier his
religious sentiments had hardened into a joyless and militant
puritanism.

Whittier's poetry revealed a militancy of a different sort,
a sympathy for the downtrodden that Garrison had yet to
experience. His poems denounced war and violence, con-
demned wealth and fame as "mad'ning zeal" and "earthly
pride." His Quaker prophecy of a world of endless bloom
"far beyond the reach of time" suddenly seemed more appeal-
ing than Fanny's dire predictions. If Whittier's practical
simplicity still eluded Garrison, he understood his young
friend's appeal to conscience and was touched by it. Whit-
tier showed him that a Christian life was not an impossibility.
Temperamental opposites they certainly were; Whittier, shy,
painfully self-conscious, introspective; Garrison, ebullient
and aggressive. Yet each possessed a moral ardor that the
other recognized and respected. Whittier became firmly at-
tached to his benefactor and followed him into the anti-
slavery camp in 1833- Although he grew increasingly critical
of Garrison's aims and methods thereafter and finally broke
with him altogether, he continued to defend him against
critics long after their close friendship died. In him Garrison
found that rarity among reformers — a man as dedicated and
strong-willed as himself with whom he could not quarrel

Soon after his meeting with Whittier he discovered William
Ladd, the Yankee pacifist and founder of the American Peace
Society, whose visit to Newburyport in the summer of 1826
launched him on his career of Christian reform. The handful
of parishioners who gathered in the Congregational Meeting-
House in Newburyport on a June evening in 1826 expecting

5° THE

another pious sermon on the "peace question" found William
Ladd something of an anomaly. A huge mountain of a man,
carelessly dressed, with an easygoing manner that belied his

enormous energy, Ladd was no religious ascetic but a retired
sea captain with a Falstaffian wit. To Garrison, who listened
carefully as Ladd took the measure of his subject in the salty
phrases of a seaman, he seemed a huge compound of fat, good

nature a»d benevolence. Who was this strange man whose
earthy humor carried a Christian message?

William Ladd was one of the legendary race of Yankees in
whom there mingled freely the shrewdness of a Down East
peddler and the visionary zeal of a crank* He was born just
before the Revolution, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the
son of a well-to-do merchant. In 1797 he graduated from
Harvard and then shipped aboard one of his father's merchant-
men for a year* In 1806 he returned to the sea, this time as
supercargo on the Negro sloop captained by the famous Paul
Coffee,, in order to study the Negro character. Then, sick of
the sea and dissatisfied with his aimless life, he retired to his
father's farm in Minot, Maine, where he discovered for the
first time "that Name which is above every name/* became
converted and joined the church. Henceforth his life was
given over to experiments in scientific farming and conducting
evangelical forays among his neighbors*

Ladd discovered the peace cause at the bedside of the
Revemid Jesse Appleton, president of Bowdoin College and
a founder of the Massachusetts Peace Society. Appleton gave
him Noah Worcester's Solemn Rewe*w of the Custom of War
to study; and a quick perusal of the tract convinced Ladd
that finally, at the age of forty-one, he had found a way to
be useful. In 1826 he was tramping all over New England
lecturing wherever he could find a hall and collect an audi-
ence. Like the rest of the reformers who were soon to claim

THE YOUNG CONSERVATIVE 5!

Garrison's attention, he preached instant repentance and total
dedication. "He who does not give his prayers, his influence,
his talents, and, if necessary, his purse," he told his Newtrary-
port listeners, "fails in his duty as a Christian and a man."
Garrison was struck by this plain reasoning. Here in the
person of a rustic reformer was a vital religious force that
could change the world. Ladd's argument was simple and
practical Americans were politically free — why could they
not become morally free? Cleanse America of evil by convert-
ing the sinner to righteousness, the warmonger to a man of
peace. Bring him to Christ, show him the error of his ways,
give him salvation as a cure. What this homely Yankee pro-
posed, Garrison suddenly realized, was a blueprint of the per-
fect society. In Ladd's proposition lay the seeds of a great
Christian movement.

Enthusiastically he reported Ladd's speech in his paper. No
one, he wrote, could doubt that the pacifist was destined to
prove the foremost philanthropist of his age, a man of "noble
efforts."25 Thus began a friendship which despite prolonged
and bitter disagreement lasted until Ladd's death in 1841.
Ladd, like Whittier, was too sure of his cause and too amiably
disposed toward mankind to harbor grudges. He remained to
the last a man of peace who practiced what he preached.

In September the Free frets collapsed tinder the weight of
its editor's unpopular opinions, and Garrison found himself in
financial straits. There was nothing left but to cut his losses
by selling the paper and seek work as a journeyman, printer
in Boston. He announced that "influenced by considerations
important only to himself," the editor had decided to offer
his entire establishment for quick sale. In a valedictory naore
caustic than his usual tone he announced the sale of the paper
to one John Harris. He admitted that the Free fnsf had
startled many readers, offended others, "This is a tij

52 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

age and he who attempts to walk uprightly and speak hon-
estly, cannot rationally calculate upon speedy wealth or pre-
ferment."26 He confessed to no regrets and made no apologies.
His conscience was clear.

Failure could not dull the excitement of new ideas, Ncw-
buryport hardly qualified as a sink of corruption, but his
certainty of having been victimized by its cliques and cabals
made his departure seem less of a retreat. Now that lie was
setting out for Boston it simplified his mistakes to explain them
as the work of a petty conspiracy against his good name. Such
was his mood when he plunged into a last squabble, as if to
show his fellow townsmen that nothing became his life in the
town like leaving it. This time his victim was Caleb Gushing,

Since leaving the Herald Gushing had divided his time be-
tween literature and politics. His popularity with the manu-
facturers of the Merrimack Valley led to his nomination for
the Congressional seat for Essex County against the incumbent
John Varnum of HaverhilL The campaign reached new
heights of personal animosity: Gushing was accused of loose
morals and Varnum was denounced for alleged shady dealings
with the Junto. Garrison, apprised of Cushing's views on the
tariff, remained loyal to the old Federalist principles and sup-
ported Varnum against Cushing's "coalition of interests and
family influence."27 Yet when he announced the sale of the
Free Press to Harris, who was a close friend of Cushing's, and
Harris promptly came out for his friend, rumors circulated
concerning a deal between young Garrison and the wily
Gushing, As soon as Garrison learned of the rumors he rushed
to the attack. First he fired off a letter to the Hawrhill Ga-
zette, Varnum's sheet and the source of the story, denying the
accusation and offering as proof of his fidelity to Federalism
a six-month record unblemished by even a hint of Republican
heresy. Then, still smarting at the injustice, he marched into

THE YOUNG CONSERVATIVE 53

a Gushing rally, strode to the platform, and delivered a tirade
against his former friend accusing him of cowardice and the
intent to deceive. Gushing lost the election by a wide margin,
and neither man ever forgave the other. For his part Gushing
grew convinced of his protege's dangerous fanaticism, while
Garrison, once he became an abolitionist, denounced Gushing
for every sin he could think of.

In December, 1826, Garrison left for Boston, an unem-
ployed journalist with six months' stormy experience. Not
until after the Civil War did he enjoy his return visits to
Newburyport. During the lean anti-slavery years ahead he
explained his dislike of the town as a product of its conserva-
tive opposition to his cause. A better reason perhaps was that
it had witnessed his first failure.

Boston

To THE YOUNG PROVINCIAL from Newburyport, Boston
seemed vast and forbidding in the cold gray light
of December, 1826. Hurrying through crooked streets to his
boardinghouse in the North End, he remembered earlier visits
to the city. Once on an errand to a printing house near the
waterfront he had lost his way and wandered for hours
through these same winding streets homesick and frightened,
A second trip the previous summer had also ended unhappily
when his twenty-mile hike in new shoes left him so crippled
with blisters and aching feet that he rushed to catch the first
stage home. Now he was back a third time, not the successful
young journalist he fancied himself but a lowly journeyman
printer seeking a second chance*

Formidable as it may have appeared to him, Boston in 1826
was a small city of some fifty thousand people which still
wore its colonial heritage with pride. Mayor Josiah Quincy
with the blessing of Boston's first families was just beginning
to modernize the city, paving the streets, building a new city
market, and providing police and fire protection. Lloyd Gar-
rison caught the unmistakable air of paternalism blowing
down from Beacon Hill, where merchant families preserved
their conservative opinions as carefully as their fortunes.

Wealthy Bostonians, he knew, were as fully aware of their

BOSTON 55

duty to lead the civilization of the country as the High Street
gentlemen of Newburyport By the middle of the third decade
of the nineteenth century they had settled to the task and were
enjoying what the good Dr. Bowditch called "the best days of
the Republic." Secure in their beliefs, conservative Bostonians
applauded the sentiments of Daniel Webster, discussed the
sermons of William Ellery Channing, and kept a sharp eye on
the earnings of A. & A. Lawrence & Company. In the "un-
adorned good sense" of Unitarianism and the North American
Review they found a metaphysic for their Whiggery.

That wealth and position carried responsibilities towards
their less fortunate townsmen, the leading families of Boston
never doubted. Most of the city's social services were furn-
ished by private charity* Many a Sunday afternoon Garrison
strolled through the Common to the strains of a brass band
hired by the Society for the Suppression of Vice in the vain
hope of emptying the grogshops. Wives and daughters of
leading citizens devoted leisure hours to such benevolent so-
cieties as the Boston Fatherless and Widow's Society and the
Penitent Female Refuge* By the time Lloyd Garrison arrived,
charitable associations had become a habit with Boston's well-
to-do: between 1810 and 1840 they averaged at least one new
benevolent institution a year, most of them founded for the
dual purpose of attending to the needy and repairing public
morals. The logic of Boston paternalism posited social control
as well as Christian charity, and the art of using their wealth
wisely was one which these families had fully mastered.

It was not to the Boston of Beacon Hill or to the fashion-
able West End that Garrison went on his arrival, but to the
Scott Street boardinghouse of his friend Thomas Bennett,
himself a newcomer from the 'Port. Bennett's boardinghouse
lay in the heart of another and different society of the middle
classes. This was the Boston Emerson meant when he spoke

56 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRLSON

of the city as a moving principle, "a living mind, agitating the
mass and always afflicting the conservative class with some
odious novelty or other." Middle-class Boston consisted of
professional people, small merchants, artisans, and shopkeep-
ers, many of them, like Garrison, recent arrivals from Essex
North and the Old Colony. They brought with them a sea-
board conservatism and social aspirations which they shared
with the patricians, but they wore their conservatism with a
difference. In the first place, they disliked the proprietary
manner of the old families and resented their institutionalized
snobbery. Coming from country strongholds of orthodoxy,
they mistrusted the "icy system" of Unitarianism with its cool
lucidities that replaced the majesty of God with the tricks of
human reason. The benevolence of the Boston merchants
stemmed from a recognition of their declining political power,
while the religious impulse of middle-class Boston sprang from
the rocky soil of Christian zeal

Garrison's orthodox friends in his adopted city assumed
that only Christianity could save the nation from infidelity
and licentiousness. They viewed the renovation of American
morals as a crusade which could never be won by local con-
tingents of philanthropists dispensing charity and advice but
demanded a revolutionary army organized into missionary,
tract, and Bible societies captained by the great religious lead-
ers of the day. One of these leaders was their own Lyman
Beecher, recently made pastor of the Hanover Street Church*
If the spiritual center of Unitarian Boston was Channing's
Federal Street congregation, evangelical Boston made its
headquarters in the home of Lyman Beecher in the North
End next to the old burying ground on Copp's HiU, whither
he was known frequently to retire to pray for those whose
feet stumbled on the dark mountain. Hanover Street Church
became Garrison's spiritual home and Beecher Ms mentor.

BOSTON 57

Beecher had also come to Boston in 1826 In response to a
challenge. As an organizer and what another age would call
a public-relations expert he had few peers. Earlier he had
organized the Connecticut Society for the Reformation of
Morals to protect the Standing Order against "Sabbath-break-
ers, rum-sellers, tippling folk, infidels, and ruff-scuff" who
made up the ranks of democracy. He wrote tracts, held re-
vivals, established a magazine, lectured on temperance, lobbied
for Sunday blue laws, and fought manfully to preserve the
establishment at every turn. When he finally lost the battle
against disestablishment in Connecticut in 1817, he admitted
that "it was as dark a day as ever I saw/'1 Presently, however,
he saw the light: far from destroying Christian order, dis-
establishment had actually strengthened it by cutting the
churches loose from state support. With missions, revivals,
and voluntary associations Christians could exert a far stronger
influence than ever they could with shoe buckles, cocked hats,
and gold-headed canes. To prove his point Beecher threw
himself into the work of Christian reform, fashioning Bible
and tract societies, supporting home missions, the temperance
cause and all the other benevolent associations which sprang
up in the East after 1812. Under his aegis these vast inter-
denominational societies formed a benevolent empire run by
an interlocking directorate of lay and clerical figures whose
avowed aim was the engineering of mass American consent to
Christian leadership.

As the democratization of American church polity pro-
ceeded apace, the need for a major theological reorientarion
grew urgent. This need Beecher and his old Yale classmate,
Nathaniel Taylor, attempted to meet with a doctrine of their
own. "Beechemm," or "Taylorism" as it was more com-
monly called, took for its central theme the primacy of
reason over the letter of revelation. Men are punished for

58 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

their sins, Beecher and Taylor argued, only because they
freely and willingly choose to sin. Without free agency there
could be no sinful act; men are truly free agents. Saving grace
lies within the reach of any man who will but try to come to
Christ. Sin is selfishness, and regeneration simply the act of
will which consists of the preference of God to every other
object, that act being the effect of the Holy Spirit operating
on the mind. "Whosoever will may come" — this was the real
import of their new doctrine which furnished the rationale
for the revivals and the benevolent crusade of the Second
Great Awakening. In Beecher's new formula piety and ethics,
severed in the First Great Awakening, were reunited in a
democratic evangelical puritanism,

Beecher's connection with this theology was not always
clear or consistent. Taylor was a speculative thinker and a
reformer; Beecher was neither. Deep down in his soul he was
a trimmer, and he refused to jeopardize his plans for a great
American church by getting embroiled in doctrinal dispute*
In 1826, however, when Garrison first heard him preach, he
stood foursquare behind the new theology for which he
claimed partial credit. More important, he brought to Boston
an experience in organizing religious enterprises which few
of his colleagues could match* Once established in Hanover
Street, he inaugurated a series of revivals, using a new "soft
persuasion" adapted to city congregations. It was not long
before he noticed that the evangelical people of Boston lacked
political influence. Quickly he organized the Hanover Associ-
ation of Young Men and sent its members into the city pri-
maries with instructions to outvote the "smoking loafers," re-
move the liquor booths from the Common, and stop the
Sunday steamboat excursions to Nahant, This they promptly
did, and soon Beecher was a commanding figure in Boston
society.

BOSTON 59

To Garrison, who went regularly to hear him preach, there
seemed something majestic in this stocky figure with his un-
tidy robes flying behind him as he strode to the pulpit to do
battle for the Lord, Beecher was a dynamo. Both the muscu-
larity of his sermons and his devotion to the strenuous life
revealed a man of prodigious energy, impatient of all restraint
and aching to get on with the business of Christianizing the
country. His conversation abounded in military figures —
plans of battle, shot and shell, victorious charges, and routing
the enemy. Beecher had the kind of Christian belligerence
which young Garrison understood. "As a divine," he noted
enthusiastically, "Lyman Beecher has no equal." What was
it that gave Beecher his strength? "Truth — TRUTH — de-
livered in a childlike simplicity and affection."2 Sitting in the
back pews of Hanover Street Church, Garrison did not realize
yet the full import of Beecher's message or the lengths to
which it would carry him. He only knew that Beecher offered
revealed religion as a guide; but for a young man intent on
directing the lives of other people that was enough.

More than a month went by before he found work. The
next year he spent migrating from one printing job to an-
other before joining the Massachusetts Weekly Journal, a
new Whig paper edited by David Lee Child. In his leisure he
surveyed his adopted city, strolling through Beacon Hill, ex-
ploring the wharves, and standing with the crowd on the
Common to watch the militia march on training days* He
went to hear Beecher's archenemies, Channing and John Pier-
pont, the flinty pastor of the Hollis Street Unitarian Church
and grandfather of J, Pierpont Morgan, Much as he disap-
proved of the "icy system," he was impressed with Channing's
low-keyed sermons, and from Pierpont he learned that works
were more important than doctrine. Slowly Boston cosmo-

6o THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

politanism began to tell, and a new note of sophistication ap-
peared in the verses he scribbled off for his own amusement*

I think if our first parents had been driven
From Paradise to Boston, their deep woe

Had lost its keenness — no place under heaven
For worth of loveliness, had pleased them so;

Particularly if they had resided

In that fine house for David Sears provided.3

His hunger for recognition was partially assuaged by an
incident in the summer of 1817. When Daniel Webster moved
up to the Senate, he left a vacancy in the House of Repre-
sentatives. A party caucus duly assembled in July and was
presented with the candidate of the Central Committee,
Benjamin Gorham. Gotham's nomination was just about to
be put to a vote when out of the audience and onto the plat-
form strode Garrison, primed with a lengthy speech in sup-
port of his perennial favorite, Harrison Gray Otis. The Cen-
tral Committee had already rejected Otis because of his
antiquated views on the tariff, but when Garrison launched
his panegyric, it was clear that the action of the committee
had been premature. An acid reminder from the chairman
that he was out of order failed to dampen the enthusiasm of
the fledgling orator, who was beginning to enjoy himself.
Unfortunately, halfway through his oration his memory
failed him and he had to take recourse to a copy of the
speech tucked in his hat. Still, when he finished and returned
to his seat, he found that he had upset the carefully laid plans
of the steering committee, who decided to consult Otis once
more. He left the meeting in triumph. A few days later one
of the Federalist gentlemen who had attended the caucus
wrote a letter to the Courier demanding to know the name

BOSTON 6l

of the young upstart who had disrupted the proceedings.
In his reply Garrison sympathized with his critic for the
trouble he had experienced in learning his name. "Let me as-
sure him, however, that if my life be spared, my name shall
one day be known to the world, — at least to such an extent
that common inquiry shall be unnecessary. This, I know,
will be deemed excessive vanity — but time shall prove it
prophetic."4

The editorial opportunity he sought came in the person of
the Reverend William Collier, who ran a boardinghouse on
Milk Street. Collier was a Baptist city missionary and the
editor of a struggling temperance newspaper, the National
Philanthropist, His boardinghouse served as a haven for mis-
sionaries, visiting clergymen, itinerant evangelists and Chris-
tian reformers of all kinds; his paper exposed the evils of
drink and denounced gambling, prostitution, dueling, and
theatergoing, and extolled the virtues of Bible societies, home
missions, and Sabbath observance. In its pages each week
could be found the evangelical prescription for a better world.

At Collier's Garrison met the printer of the National
Philanthropist, Nathaniel White, who hired him as a type-
setter sometime late in 1827. When Collier, discouraged by
the anemic circulation of his paper, decided to sell out to his
printer, White made Garrison his new editor. On January
4, 1828, the National Philanthropist appeared for the first
time under new editorial direction, although Garrison's name
did not appear on the masthead until March,

Once again he set out to refashion a newspaper according
to his notions of popular journalism. He increased the number
of columns, enlarged the format, and cleaned up the typog-
raphy. Collier's motto, Moderate Drinking is the Downhill
Road to Drunkenness, he decided to keep, but for Collier's
sermons he substituted stinging editorials. His experiences

6z THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

with the Free Press had taught him the need for a platform.
In an editorial entitled "Moral Character of Public Men" he
expounded his new philosophy of reform. "Moral principles
should be inseparably connected with political; and the
splendid talents of the dissolute must not be preferred to the
competent, though inferior, abilities of the virtuous of our
land." Americans, he continued, had never understood the
need for a moral influence sufficient to control party in-
temperance and enhance the value of public opinion. It there-
fore behooved Christians especially to guard against "the
common partialities and obliquities of political strife*" Political
parties should henceforth be subject to Christian control No
longer would the duelist, the gambler, the debauchcr, or the
"profane swearer" be elected simply because he was a Federal-
ist or a Republican. Political morality must be raised to the
level of Christian behavior. "It is due to our principles, our
civil, social and moral institutions, that men whose characters
are notoriously bad should be deprived of the control of our
political destinies/'5

There was nothing new in Garrison's plea for religious in-
fluence in politics; it had been the stock-in-trade of evangeli-
cals and their benevolent societies for fifteen years* Behind its
seemingly nonpartisan appeal lay the conservative opinions
of clericals who sought to defend the established order from
onrushing democracy* One of the most striking of the many
ironies that studded Garrison's career was the fact that his
anti-slavery radicalism evolved out of a literal interpretation
of these principles of Christian conservatism.

The professed aim of the benevolent societies which sprang
up after 1812 in response to the challenge of democracy was
the extension of the Christian faith and the reformation of
public morals. The American Bible Society, the Sunday
School Union, the American Tract Society, home and foreign

BOSTON 63

missionary societies all shared the common goal of educating
the citizen for participation in a Christian America- The
publications of the Bible Society urged its members to scruti-
nize voting lists and elect only Christian candidates* The
Society for the Preservation of the Sabbath discredited any
office-seeker who failed to keep the Sabbath. The Temperance
Society withheld its support from any politician known to
imbibe. And so it went. Denied entrance to the halls of state
through the main portals, the ministers availed themselves of
the back door. If they could not make the laws themselves,
they could see to it that the laws recognized their influence.
By the time Garrison joined them, the benevolent societies
were busy as never before operating a gigantic political lobby,
publicity bureau, and propaganda machine in the interests of
the new puritanism.

When it came to defining the Christian statesman the
evangelical formula grew blurred. It was all well and good to
insist on honesty, trust, duty, and uprightness, but what did
these words really mean? Granted that the unregenerate
politician could be identified by his sins — tippling, gambling,
and general licentious behavior, but the positive content of
the ideal of Christian statesmanship remained unexplored, The
evangelical argument ran like this: A "professing Christian"
is one who is regenerate (L e., has received saving grace) and
is thus free from selfishness, hypocrisy, and dishonesty. Once
in office he is bound to make the right decisions. His views
on the tariff, land grants, or the Bank hardly matter since he
can always be trusted to reach a Christian solution* On the
theory that it takes a Christian to recognize and elect a fellow
communicant, the evangelicals argued that social reform
really begins with the moral reform of individuals. Not until
everyone is purified can the problem of Christian govern-
ment be solved. Poverty, slavery, capital punishment, im~

64 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

prisonment for debt, extension of the franchise, all the major
social problems await the regeneration of the individual Once
the saints are legion they will make their righteousness felt,
and their moral oninicompetencc will ensure a reign of peace
and justice.

Thus the problems of social and political reform were re-
duced in the evangelical equation to elements of personal
morality. By reforming the individual and bringing him to
Christ the preachers would mysteriously change his heart
and thereby qualify him for leadership. Piecemeal reforms,
especially those favored by political parties and disaffected
minorities, they dismissed as pernicious half-measures based on
compromise rather than the rock of universal love.

Such in all its essentials was the doctrine of moral reform
as Garrison understood and accepted it, an equation of duties
and rewards. "If we have hitherto lived without reference
to another state of existence," he wrote in one of his new
editorials, "let us do so no longer," The fruits of earth are
bitter. Christians must lay up treasures in heaven "where
change and decay have never entered, and the ardent aspira-
tions of the soul are satisfied in the fulness of God." The balm
of Gilead alone can restore peace to the troubled, health
to the wounded, and happiness to the suffering; "its applica-
tion will make men the heirs of joyous immortality; and thanks
to the Great Physician of souls, this sovereign balm can be ob-
tained without money and without price*"6 Faith without
works, however, was not enough. The very certainty of
Christian truth dictated the need for an immediate reform of
the evils of the world.

If I were an atheist and expected to perish like the ox — or a deist,
and rejected God's glorious and exalted revelation — or if I dis-
believed the doctrine of rewards and punishments in a future

BOSTON 65

life — or professed to receive all my happiness on earth — neither
my interest nor my pleasure would lead me to squander away
existence upon the unproductive things of the world. I could not
be so selfish (with my present feelings) as to remain an idler here,
or a passive spectator of the contest between right and wrong —
virtue and vice — truth and error — which must continue to the
end of time. . . . While there remains a tyrant to sway the iron
rod of power, or chain about the body or mind to be broken, I
cannot surrender my arms. While drunkenness and intemperance
abound, I will try to reclaim the dissolute, and to annihilate the
progress of vice. While profanity and sabbath-breaking, and
crime wound my ear and affect my sight, I will reprove, admonish
and condemn. While the demon of war is urging mankind to
deeds of violence and revenge, I will 'study the things that make
for peace.' While a soul remains unenlightened, uneducated, and
without *the glorious gospel of the blessed God,' my duty is
plain — I will contribute my little influence to the diffusion of
universal knowledge.7

From now on, he promised, his methods would be those of
Christian example and enterprise. "The gospel of Christ
breathes peace to men," he explained, "its language is full of
the mildness of God. . . . This gospel is not to be propagated
by fire and sword, nor nourished by blood and slaughter. It
must go forth nmder the banner of the cross."8 Beneath that
banner in the years to come he would collect a band of
militant Christian rebels who cared less for the mildness of
God than for their freedom of conscience.

If it was true that politics and morals were indistinguishable,
how could the religious reformer avoid the pitfalls of party
politics? It was one thing to point out, as he did, the "inutility,
the folly, the slothfulness and bane of party spirit." Still, the
notion that opinions and habits could be changed without
votes and laws, he admitted, was both "visionary" and "highly

66 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM IXOYD GARRISON

dangerous." Private example might influence a household,
but only public effort could convert a nation, "Hence it has
seemed to me," he wrote, "that the readiest way to operate on
the mass of society is to begin with the opulent." The manners
of fashionable people soon become law to an otherwise "law-
less multitude" — "its enactments go into immediate opera-
tion; it is a stream, winding through the innumerable chan-
nels of community, transparent, gentle, fructifying — or turbid
with pollution, and pernicious in its circulation." Thus he saw
in the General Union for Promoting the Observance of the
Christian Sabbath, supported by wealthy businessmen, "the
most efficient instrument in the cause of religion and public
morality ever put into practice in any age and country,*'*
To the Jacksonian critics who complained that such groups
were cancerous growths on the body politic he replied with
the warning that "unless societies are formed to operate upon
public sentiment, to sound the trumpet of alarm over a
slumbering land, to give adaptation and strength to the hands
of the people, the tide of desolation will continue to swell
till neither ark nor mountain will be able to save us from
destraaion."10

At this point Garrison was fairly caught in the evangelical
contradiction, for if the urgency of the American political
situation was clear, so was the necessity of choosing sides.
He could not avoid political choice any more than the evan-
gelicals could mask their Whiggish prejudices. He took care
to remind his readers that he was not permitted to indulge in
political dispute, that "it does not become us to advocate
particular candidates for office*" All he could do was to urge
them to seek out "Christian and moral men" worthy of their
confidence. Yet when Daniel Webster was criticized by the
Boston merchants for his about-face on the tariff question,
Garrison rushed to the defense of that "star in the galaxy of

BOSTON 67

American worthies."11 As to the tariff, he admitted to
strongly favoring protection, which would help supply the
domestic market "with cheaper goods than England can.
possibly do,"12

The National Philanthropist was strictly prohibitionist. To
dramatize the dangers of alcohol Garrison resorted to every
sensational trick he knew — lurid tales of spontaneous com-
bustion, stories of starving families victimized by the drunk-
ard's curse, and reams of homiletic verse.

What is the cause of every ill?
That does with pain the body fill?
It is the oft repeated gill
Of Whiskey

What makes chill penury prevail,
Makes widows moan and orphans wail,
And fills the poor house and the jail?
Tis Whiskey.1*

Patiently he distinguished for readers the absolute evil
of alcohol from lesser sins like gluttony. "If my companion
swallow a turkey or masticate a small pig, or demolish a sirloin
of beef, he does not whet my appetite nor induce me to follow
his example."14

To expand the circulation of the National Philanthropist
he wagered that all tipplers who subscribed to it would save at
least the cost of the paper in six months' time. He also en-
listed the support of women and expressed surprise that
"assimilated as is domestic enjoyment with a temperate house-
hold," appeals to the weaker sex were so few. With all due al-
lowance for their retired habits, it was essential to capitalize on
the "immense influence which the females of our country are

68 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

capable of exerting over our habits and manners as a people."10
Thus began his lifelong liaison with "female influence," the
evangelical practice which Hawthorne and then James de-
plored as the cause of an insidious feminizing of the American
character. Eventually the Zenobias, the Olive Chancellors and
Miss Birdscyes became the mainstays of Garrisonian reform.

Garrison relished the role of public censor. His paper
advertised projects like the Penitent Female Refuge to "bring
back the abandoned from the path of lewdness and moral
death" and the Society for the Promotion of Morality and
Piety in Boston, As a self-appointed guardian of American
morals, he set out to purify the national literary taste. First
to fall beneath his censorious eye were the "vile outpourings"
of Tom Moore, those "unholy emanations of Icwdncss and
intemperance." He recommended as a corrective to the Irish
Anacreon the "comprehensive and masterly" sermons on
intemperance of Lyman Beecher.16

His campaign for purity involved him in a skirmish with
Boston culture — with the "indelicate*' offerings of Mrs.
Knight at the Federal Street Theater and the "bill of licen-
tiousness" offered by an Italian dance troupe at the Tremont.
Even the Immortal Bard, whose plays caused every virtuous
man to "veil his face/7 failed to meet his exacting standards
of decency. Lotteries, Sunday mails, and Sabbath-breaking
loomed large as sins of huge dimensions. The sight of "profli-
gate coxcombs and dissipated dandies" enjoying a Sunday
stroll sent him straight to his desk to demand rigid enforce-
ment of blue laws* Behind the lumbering Sunday mail coaches
he saw "skepticism and depravity" stalking abroad. In dark
moments like these he wondered why Christians wasted their
lives in fruitless doctrinal quarrels "while infidelity* is seeking
to subvert the purity of our institutions and the permanency
of our liberties."17

BOSTON 69

He did not really believe all of his predictions of impend-
ing doom. Though he scarcely realized it, his belief in moral
progress harmonized completely with the confident outlook
of the Jacksonian age. In 1828 Senator Richard M. Johnson,
spokesman for the New West and archenemy of the New
England clergy, delivered an oration on the Senate floor
in which he prophesied unlimited progress as the American
destiny. Reading Johnson's speech, Garrison was moved to add
an editorial comment of his own. He examined and rejected
the romantic notion of the mortality of civilizations. "The
idea has obtained in all ages that there must be a constant
succession of empires, like waves of the ocean, and that the
oblivious hand of time must blot out with the lapse of
centuries. Nothing can be more erroneous."18 America's
future, he concluded, was unlimited, with population expand-
ing, a government based on equality of rights, humanity
and justice blended with religious principle. Why should
the Republic crumble or dissolve?

Garrison's hymn to progress formed part of the liturgy
of evangelicalism. For all their jeremiads and professional pes-
simism the American evangelicals were the unwitting carriers
of the Revolutionary heritage. Their faith in the efficacy
of voluntary associations revealed a deep commitment to the
doctrine of progress. They believed that they could convert
a wicked nation to goodness simply by organizing and direct-
ing pubHc opinion, that is, by the judicious use of Christian
pressure groups. But who could say where this process might
end? In stressing the importance of public opinion they gave
their own meaning to the ideal of democratic association,
but their vision of progress and their ideal of the free indi-
vidual were fundamentally similar to the perfectionist image
of the Jeffersonians. True, they cried down natural reason
and the Enlightenment world view. Nevertheless, their ac-

70 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

ceptance of the principle of free association and their cer-
tainty of the power of revealed truth to win in the open mar-
ket sustained and carried forward the optimism of the
Revolutionary generation. In perfecting their scheme for a

stable society strong in religious habit and united in the
Protestant faith they discovered the very democratic tech-
niques which were soon to be turned against them. The whole
benevolent apparatus — open societies, public meetings, free
literature, propaganda — which they used to impose a con-
servative Christian pattern on American society might as
easily be appropriated by another group of reformers with
a more explosive cause. Tracts, newspapers and placards, so
effective in fighting Sabbath-breaking and the Sunday mails,
could also be used to free the slaves. In the principle of
voluntary association they had found an effective method for
agitating causes which could divide as well as unify the
country. Had they but known it, the evangelicals had fash-
ioned an engine of national self-destruction. All that logic
required was a man who practiced the Christian zeal they
preached.

Gradually Garrison began to distinguish between com-
plaints of irreligious behavior and major social evils* He con-
tinued to lash out at profane language and licentiousness, at
habits like "the present rage of sporting huge mustaches,'*
but he was slowly discovering that there were certain ques-
tions to which the evangelicals had no easy answers* One of
these was William Ladd's peace question and the problem
of defensive war. Indifference to principle nettled him. If war
was morally wrong, how could defensive war be right? If
slavery was un-Chri$tian» why did Christians practice it?
What could be more reasonable than the attempt to live by the
all-sufficient word of God? The more he pondered the gospel
of Christ the closer he was drawn to its simple message —

BOSTON 71

"Go ye and do likewise." The theological implications of
Christian perfectionism were not yet clear to him. Just how
truth could be gleaned from the chaff of Biblical contradic-
tions he did not as yet know. He was satisfied to consult
his conscience and then act.

In this mood of self-examination he approached the prob-
lem of American apathy. What but "indifference" explained
the reluctance of Christians to undertake the work of reform?
"There are, in faith, few reasoning Christians," he wrote;
"the majority of them are swayed more by the usages of
the world than by any definite perception of what constitutes
duty."19 Was there not enough Christian influence in the
country to reform it?

By the "duty of reasoning Christians" he did not mean
simply the common-sense adaptations of religious precepts to
daily Hf e, but a purer and more personal belief in the superior-
ity of the righteous man. Slavery and war, vices "incorporated
into the existence of society," could only be corrected by re-
fashioning America according to the word of God. The er-
rors of the evangelicals, he saw, lay not in their ideals but in
their failure to live up to them. It was a question of funda-
mentals—spiritual principles were levers for moving the
world, social action a form of personal atonement. Slowly he
was learning that evangelical passion logically ends in radical-
ism; further, that perfectionism and radicalism are similar
states of mind. In the consistency with which he pursued his
discovery lay the profound unity of his life.

The radical in American politics, like his counterpart the
true evangelical, stands outside the community, his isolation
defined by his ideals. To his less excitable fellows he is
something of an anomaly, admirable perhaps, but irritating.
Since his actions are dictated by conscience alone they are
usually predictable. He combines steadfastness of purpose with

j2 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

an almost reckless disregard of self-interest. He will not
compromise his beliefs and prefers to suffer, indeed to court,
martyrdom rather than give in to the majority. His dis-
trusts politics and relies instead on a direct appeal to the
moral sense of other people. He views society as a collection
of individuals to be rededicated by his teachings — as a pool
of water whose placid surface is broken by single pebbles
tossed upon it, each one radiating concentric circles of right
conduct. Because he rests his case on emotion rather than
reason, the radical is wary of subtleties which he calls hair-
splitting. Something of an anti-intellectual, he mistrusts the
doctrinaire yet is often guilty of ex cathedra pronouncements
himself. Consistency is not his forte: in his search for a better
vantagepoint from which to analyze the evils of society he
frequently and often abruptly shifts his ground. His motives
are mixed and not always harmonious. He often wavers be-
tween the compulsion to be right and the urge to make others
right. This tension between the demands of self and the claims
of other people is both a weakness and a strength — a weak-
ness because it often blinds him to the realities of political
change; a strength because it makes conscience the touch-
stone of all behavior. This outline of the American radical
temperament is also the profile of Garrison's personality,

One of the myths that attach themselves to the American
radical is that of rugged independence* The image of the lone
figure struggling against overwhelming odds is a naturally
appealing one to an age that enjoys chiefly the nostalgia of
the history of American radicalism. Garrison was the willing
perpetrator of just such a myth. He liked to tell how, unaided
and alone, he found his way to abolition and formed the
crusade that eventually freed the Negro. This legend, care-
fully matured by his followers, ensured his fame but obscured
the debts he owed to others. Beecher and Boston supplied

BOSTON

73

him with most of the causes and techniques he used in the
anti-slavery cause. Long after he denounced Beecher and the
evangelicals he remained obligated to them for the convic-
tions which led him to racial equality. He came to Boston a
brash young man without a cause; he left eighteen months
later sure that he had found one. The year 1828 was his
anmis mimbiUs for which the evangelicals had prepared him.
In March of that year Benjamin Lundy arrived in Boston.

4
Benjamin Lundy

ON THE EVENING of March 1 7, 1 82 8, Benjamin Lundy
gathered a group of Boston ministers in William Col-
lier's boardinghouse to discuss the means of forming a local
anti-slavery society. The meeting was hardly a success. Of
the handful of clergymen assembled only Samuel Joseph May,
the young pastor of the Unitarian Church in Cambridgeport,
evinced the slightest interest in Lundy's project. The rest,
while stoutly maintaining their dislike of slavery, opposed
anything so rash as a society to abolish it. If he hoped to
change their minds, Lundy might as well have been talking
to the cobblestones in Milk Street.

As he lectured the group Lundy noticed a young man
with a balding head and steel-rimmed glasses who sat on the
edge of his chair, eyes fixed intently on Lundy, following
every word and nodding his head vigorously in agreement.
After the meeting Lundy spoke to his admirer, whose name
he understood to be Garrison, the twenty-two-year-old editor
of Collier's paper. Garrison told him of his high regard for
Lundy's own newspaper, the Genius of Unwerwl Bmancipa**
tion, and showed him an editorial he had written denouncing
slaveholders for trying to "seal up the mind and debase the
intellect of a man to brutal incapacity/' a()ur boasted
liberty/' he had written, "is a paradox. We have warmed in

BENJAMIN LUNDY 75

our bosom a serpent, the poison of whose sting is felt through
every vein of the republic; we have been industriously creat-
ing mines of irremediable destruction, gathering materials for
a national catastrophe."1 Reading this bombast, Lundy may
have noticed Garrison's confession that he lacked information
"by which to form an accurate statement of what has been
done and the means now in operation to redeem the oppressed
and degraded sons of Africa in our land." When he finished
chatting with Garrison, Lundy realized that he had only to
supply this information to make a convert. Little did he know
that his facts were the keys to Pandora's box and that he was
about to release a scourge of God.

Benjamin Lundy was born a Quaker in Sandwich, New
Jersey, in 1789. His great-grandfather had been one of the
original settlers of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and a founder
of the Society of Friends there. As a Quaker, Lundy in-
herited a long tradition of uncompromising resistance to
slavery, a tradition that emphasized the moral wrong of
slaveholding and reduced the problem to the dimensions of
individual conscience. The opinions of the Quakers were not
always moderate and inoffensive. Their belief in the im-
mediacy of the Holy Spirit and their trust in the informed
conscience freed them from institutional prejudices and the
need to compromise, Lundy's forebears bequeathed to him
a concern with personal worthiness and soul-searching, an
unyielding hostility to slavery, the militant views and blunt
language of Christian zealots. He found this same spirit reborn
in his young friend,

Lundy was a slight, stoop-shouldered, brittle man with
thinning reddish hair — quiet, unassuming, and absolutely
fearless* His initiation into the anti-slavery movement came
on a trip to Wheeling, West Virginia, which was a regular
stop for the slave coffles headed from the Tidewater over the

j6 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

mountains into the Old Southwest. As he watched the pro-
cession of manacled slaves driven through the dusty streets,
he was filled with revulsion and the iron entered his soul.
In Ohio, where he settled after the war of 1812, he formed
the Union Humane Society, an abolitionist organization that
numbered five hundred members at the end of its first year.
During the Missouri crisis he went to St. Louis and witnessed
the defeat of the free-state forces there before returning to
Ohio penniless and discouraged. There were two Quaker
anti-slavery newspapers in the Mississippi Valley at this
time — the Philanthropist^ edited by Charles Osborne, and the
E?mncipatory published by Elihu Embree. When Embree
died suddenly and Osborne's sheet was sold to a printer who
did not measure up to Lundy's anti-slavery standards, he
decided to print a paper of his own. Accordingly, he moved
to Mt Pleasant, Ohio, where he brought out the first number
of the Genius of Universal Emancipation in January, 1821.
When he first met Garrison, he was stili printing his paper
between trips to the West Indies and lecture tours in New
England.

Lundy drove himself mercilessly. He usually carried his
type with him on his travels, stopping to print an issue of his
paper whenever he found the time and the money. His travels
took him into Quaker meetings on Nantucket and in the hill
towns of North Carolina, the drawing rooms of wealthy
Philadelphia Friends and the shacks of free Negroes in
Baltimore. A pioneer in the field of anti-slavery lecturing,
he was not, as Garrison soon realized, an effective orator. His
weak voice and halting delivery made him much more effec-
tive in small gatherings than in the lecture hall Yet he was
accustomed to mobs and brickbats. Six months before he
met Garrison he was accosted in a Baltimore street by an
irate slave-trader named Austin Woolfolk who had been the

BENJAMIN LtJNDY 77

target of one of his more caustic editorials. Woolfolk chal-
lenged him, knocked him flat, and then, discovering that he
had no intention of defending himself, proceeded to adminis-
ter a brutal beating. Lundy picked himself up and marched
to the nearest police station to swear out a writ against his
assailant. After a seemingly endless delay he had the satisfac-
tion of receiving damages to the amount of one dollar.

Until he met Lundy, Garrison had felt no immediate con-
cern for the slave. To be sure, slavery was a national wrong
which would someday have to be corrected. He had discussed
the slave insurrections in South Carolina with Caleb Gushing
and followed the progress of the Missouri debates with in-
terest. His religious upbringing and his mother's possessive
grip had taught him to hate the idea of holding property in
human beings. No doubt he sincerely believed slavery the
"curse" he named it in the pages of his papers. Its effects,
however, were little felt in New England where it had been
abandoned fifty years before. Lundy may have argued that
the people of the free states carried the blood of the slave
"on every finger," but most New Englanders thought other-
wise. Except for the childhood interlude in Baltimore, Garri-
son had seen nothing of slavery and knew little of its extent
and political power. His meeting with Lundy was thus a
turning point in his life, for it was Lundy's facts and figures
which persuaded him that here was a cause more important
than temperance and Sabbath observance.

He promptly reported Lundy's meeting at Collier's as a
clarion call for "a strong and extensive interest in the cause
of emancipating the slaves in our country."2 Lundy's spell
still held him, for he announced that the clergymen had given
"their entire approbation" to his ideas. He praised Lundy
and described the Genius of Universal Efinncipauon as "the
bravest and best attempt in the history of newspaper publica-

78 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

tions." He cited Lundy's figures on the number of anti-
slavery societies as proof of the great advance of Southern

humanitarian sentiment. Even the American Colonization
Society came in for its share of the plaudits along with
Lundy's Haitian colonization scheme. He noted that over
one thousand free Negroes had already been sent back to
Africa while over seven thousand were now established in
Haiti. "This number may appear insignificant, when con-
trasted with the rapid increase of slaves in the southern
States, during the same period; but this very multiplication
magnifies the extent of the relief which has been given; for if
these immigrants had remained, how long would it have taken
to redouble their number?" Soon he would draw from the
same set of figures an entirely different conclusion as to the
worth of the Colonization Society- Now he saw only the
rapid progress of Christian spirit; the prejudices of the South
were gradually yielding to the dictates of humanity and
justice; anti-slavery societies were being formed; and public
opinion against slavery was gathering a force which in time
would become irresistible.

Had Garrison bothered to examine Southern opinion care-
fully he would have discerned a far different temper. Under
the pressure of declining prices and a revived Northern
humanitarianism the South was abandoning the Jeffersonian
ideal of a free society for a defense of slavery as a positive
good. The "positive good" defense of slavery preceded
Garrison's entrance into the anti-slavery movement by nearly
a decade. At a time when he first began to think about slavery,
Southern intellectuals had already discovered a divine sanction
for their way of life* In the years to come many of them
protested that their defense was a reaction against the ir-
responsible attacks of Garrison and his fellow fanatics, but
the truth was that their rationale of slavery had been com-

BENJAMIN LUNDY 79

pleted long before the first number of the Liberator appeared.

With the arrival of the Missouri question in Congress,
Southern liberalism entered upon a period of decline. The
assertion of federal power to regulate slavery in the ter-
ritories, no matter how dangerous a usurpation of the powers
of the states, was a debatable issue which Southern statesmen
felt competent to discuss. When Northern restrictionists
injected the question of "higher law," however, the debates
rose to the rarefied plane of moral philosophy where the de-
fenders of slavery felt distinctly uncomfortable. The natural
law argument, as expounded on the Senate floor by Rufus
King of New York, was deceptively simple. If it was wrong
for individuals to hold property in other men, King reasoned,
it was wrong for groups of men to own slaves; and all com-
pacts or laws imposing slavery were void because they vio-
lated the law of nature which is the law of God and para-
mount to all human control8

There were several ways of dealing with the natural law
argument, the most extreme of which was to reject it out of
hand. This course John Randolph took when he pronounced
the Declaration of Independence, the restrictionists' chief
authority, "a fanfaronade of metaphysical abstractions." Wil-
liam Pinkney of Maryland submitted a modified version of
Randolph's indictment by declaring that Jefferson's "self-
evident truths" were, properly construed, neither self-evident
nor truths. As a counterweight to the hazy abstractions of the
Declaration he offered the seemingly more substantial pre-
scriptive rights of Edmund Burke.

King and his Northern contingent were most vulnerable to
Southern shafts when they identified natural law with the
law of God, The Southerners knew their Bible quite as well
as the New Englanders, and the Old Testament provided them
with all the ammunition they needed. They put their case in

80 THE LIBERATOR; WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

the form of a syllogism: Whatever God sanctioned for the
Hebrews He intended for all times; God gave the Hebrews
the institution of slavery; therefore slavery bore the stamp
of divine approval It followed that slavery was "natural" in
the only intelligible sense of the word; that is, it was a natural
possession of all civilizations and a natural part of God's plan.
In the measured terms of Burke's reinterpretation of natural
law Southern congressmen announced their desertion of the
Enlightenment camp for the fortress of romantic con-
servatism.

Garrison, in imputing to the South an enlightened con-
science, could not have been more wrong* If he had troubled
to study the Missouri debates, that "title page to a great tragic
volume," as John Quincy Adams called them, he might have
read a speech by Senator William Smith of South Carolina
which would have changed his mind* In the course of his
long and turgid oration Smith invoked the Bible, history, and
science in support of slavery. There had always been slaves,
he said, ever since the Flood, Christ tacitly approved slave-
holding and so did the Holy Fathers. Criticism of slavery
proceeded from the heated brains of fanatics whose misguided
zeal disrupted the pattern of Christian living. As for Jeffer-
son's disturbing ideas in Notes on Virginia, they were simply
the "effusions of speculative philosophy of his young and
ardent mind, and which his riper years have corrected,"
Let Northerners, he warned, think twice before interfering
with Southern institutions*

Smith's devious route to "higher ground/' Garrison soon
learned, marked the trail for many a Southern pamphleteer
in the next few years. Already new groups of propagandists
were urging Southerners to quit apologizing for slavery*
The South Carolinians Thomas Cooper, Whitemarsh B*
Seabrook, and Edward Brown attempted to prove the merits

BENJAMIN LUNDY 8 1

of the slave system with Biblical and historical precedents.
"Slavery," Brown wrote, "has ever been the stepping ladder
by which countries have passed from barbarism to civiliza-
tion.'74 As the decade progressed these sentiments were echoed
throughout the lower South until, in 1829, the Governor of
South Carolina could announce to the legislature, "Slavery is
not a national evil; on the contrary, it is a national benefit"®
Soon Thomas R. Dew, James Hammond, William Harper,
and Albert Taylor Bledsoe would embroider this argument
with their own distinctive rhetoric, but with the exception of
George Fitzhugh, later pro-slavery thinkers added little to this
premise. Arguments from Scripture and history sufficed for
some years to come to hold the line against Northern humani-
tarians.

Garrison was so impressed with Lundy's "unconquerable
spirit of reform" that he decided to join his crusade. Hence-
forth slavery took precedence over all the other moral causes
with his decision "to spread the light of knowledge and
religious liberty wherever darkness and superstition reign."
But the National Philanthropist proved a poor medium for
his new cause. Its circulation was none too healthy, and be-
sides, as the owner reminded him, it was a prohibition paper
which supposedly eschewed political controversy. Yet politics
were crowding in on Garrison until his self-imposed restraints
on editorial opinion suddenly seemed hypocritical He ex-
amined the tariff question again and found New England's
demands for protection perfectly just. When. South Caro-
lina publicly weighed the value of the Union, he could not
refrain from offering a word of warning to her "blustering
demagogues" with their "rebellion mania." "Now all this
bombast and bullying will accomplish nothing. The tariff
may be oppressive and unproductive, but it cannot be altered
till another session of Congress. If THE PEOPLE are dissatisfied,

8z THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

let them wait in quiet submission till December, and then let
petitions for redress pour in. ... But to declaim about open
resistance — !!"0 Thus spoke the future secessionist in 1828.

On the Fourth of July he submitted his resignation with
the announcement that his new convictions forced him to seek
"a different though perhaps not more honorable or beneficial
employment." In August Lundy returned to the city for a
second attempt to crack Boston's "icy reserve." Everywhere
in New England he found Yankees rather "cool calculators"
on the subject of slavery. His meeting in Boston was held in
the vestry of the Federal Street Church despite the vehement
protests of its pastor, the Reverend Howard Malcolm. Quietly
yet forcefully Lundy outlined his program of voluntary
manumission and criticized the American Colonization
Society's policy of purchasing slaves, which, he argued, em-
ployed the wealth but not the will of the people. When he
finished, up jumped the Reverend Malcolm and proceeded
to excoriate Lundy's scheme and any other plan for inter-
fering with slavery. As slavery moved farther south, he
pointed out, it was gradually declining and soon would be
excluded from all but the southernmost states. Meanwhile it
behooved Christians to refrain from agitating this vexing
subject

Garrison was incensed by Malcolm's bold apology for
slavery; he dashed off a letter to the Boston Courier blasting
Malcolm and calling on all "high-minded, spirited and phil-
anthropic men" to join him in petitioning Congress for the
abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Next he drew
up a plan for circulating petitions throughout the state. At a
second meeting with Luady he suggested exploring the pos-
sibilities of a local abolition society, but both he and Lundy
knew how slim their chance of success really was. He was

BENJAMIN LUNDY ^ 83

getting a taste of the opposition anti-slavery would provoke in
the future, and he liked it.

Lack of money and the importunings of politicians ended
this first experiment in agitation. Late in August a group of
town fathers from Bennington, Vermont, came to Boston in
search of an unemployed editor with a spirit sufficiently ad-
venturous to publish an Adams campaign sheet in their state.
Directed to Garrison, they were desperate enough by this
late date to accept all of his terms, including the right to
discuss slavery and other moral reforms in the projected
newspaper. As for Garrison, the lingering appeal of politics
and the hope of a steady income for at least six months were
strong inducements to return to the free-wheeling partisan
journalism of the Free Press. He accepted on the spot. With
a single timid anti-slavery petition and an unfinished plan for
an abolitionist society to show for his conversion he set out
for Bennington.

Horace Greeley remembered the Journal of the Times —
the name of Garrison's new venture — as one of the liveliest
newspapers in the history of Vermont journalism. More ac-
curate was the editor's description of it as "a very singular
kind of political paper."7 Its uniqueness lay, first of all, in its
belated appearance: on the evening of October 2, 1828, when
Garrison put the paper to bed for the first time, Andrew
Jackson had all but won the election. By September, Old
Hickory had been accepting the congratulations of well-
wishers in the parlor of the Hermitage, and only the unduly
pessimistic thought the honors premature. Adams was cheer-
fully conceded all of New England, but the rest of the
country was expected to go for Jackson. All that could be
rightfully demanded of the Journal of the Times was to con-
firm this sad prediction by holding Bennington and Vermont
for the administration against the Jacksonian tide.

84 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Garrison's employers must have doubted their wisdom
when they picked up the first issue of the Journal of the
Times to read that their paper would be "trammelled by no
interest, biased by no sect, awed by no power." The new
editor defined his objectives as the suppression of intem-
perance, the emancipation of the slave, and the perpetuity of
national peace. Far down the list came the re-election of John
Quincy Adams, which somehow was calculated to "supply the
wants of the people." Unaccountably the rumor had spread
that his paper was an Adams sheet. "The blockheads who have
had the desperate temerity to propagate this falsehood have
yet to learn our character. . . . We conduct a hireling press!
— we shall see."8 What Bennington subscribers saw was a
spiritless campaign for Adams.

In timeworn Federalist cliches he warned of dangers greater
than at any time since the formation of the Republic. The
"dregs" of society — "the vulgar, the profane, the intemper-
ate" — had been foolish enough to choose a conservative Ten-
nessee landowner "with the most aristocratical propositions"
to serve their selfish ends, "Unlettered presumption" threat-
ened the country with "universal corruption," Garrison even
suggested that British gold was at work buying votes for
Jackson, though for purposes apparently unknown. He sum-
moned Vermont to her duty, but his heart was not in it —
he simply could not warm to the task of fending off the
indiscriminate charges hurled at Adams by the Jacksonians.
Publicly he anticipated the time when the election was over
and "our literary and moral departments will exhibit a ful-
ness and excellence commensurate to their importance."0
When the election returns reached Bennington, he hurried to
put a decent face on the rout by describing it as a victory of
turbulence over order, ignorance over knowledge. He was

BENJAMIN LUNDY 85

happy to be free of his political obligation, and was just turn-
ing to weightier matters when a final quarrel between Adams
and the Federalist Old Guard erupted as if to vindicate his
lackluster performance.

Adams's troubles began when William B. Giles, an apostate
Federalist, released a letter to the press stating on the authority
of Jefferson that Adams had known of the secessionist plots
of the New England Federalists as early as 1808 and had
communicated them to Jefferson himself. Giles's letter not
unnaturally roused the ire of the Massachusetts Federalists,
who issued a denial and demanded an explanation from
Adams. The ex-President was in no mood to renew the
quarrel and replied carefully, admitting the general truth of
Giles's allegation but refusing to name names. But the Fed-
eralists were not to be thus mollified; in their rejoinder they
raised the ghost of Adams's apostasy and added new charges.
Garrison rushed to the aid of Otis and the Federalists. "We
gave Mr. Adams our ardent and entire support till the close
of the Presidential election/' he explained. But Adams had
made aspersions on New England which presented him in a
new light. He had instigated a needless quarrel and then re-
treated from the fray with "neither the frankness of sincerity,
nor the manliness of independence." If citizens had to choose,
"it were better . . . that one man should be sacrificed, than
that a large majority of the people of New England should
be implicated in a charge of once harboring designs hostile
to the Union."10 Not until he saw the crusty old warrior
battling singlehanded for the right of petitions in the House
of Representatives ten years later did Garrison realize that
he had misjudged his man.

Bennington did not take kindly to the voluble visitor from
the Bay State nor to his multifarious projects for its civic
improvement, which included a lyceum, a local temperance

86 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

society, a new heating plant for the church, and bigger and
better Sunday schools. The sight of his angular figure loping
across the green while he lectured a lagging companion, or
poised like a stump orator on the edge of a group of loiterers,
afforded the townspeople no end of merriment and quickly
earned him the sobriquet " My Lloyd Garrulous/1 "He is,
withal, a great egotist," wrote the rival editor of the Gazette,
"and when talking of himself, displays the pert loquacity of a
blue jay." He brought with him all the graces of a Boston
dandy. One week his paper sported Horatian odes to the
Green Mountains, "those stupendous monuments to God's
right hand," the next, effusions of the poet who declared him-
self "Immersed to the eyes in love" with a Boston belle. Then
what were the plain citizens of Bennington to make of lines
Mice these?

Happy is he who disdains the earth,

And plumes his hopes for a heavenly birth,—

Whose treasures are wisely laid above,
SeaTd by the bond of eternal love* — u

No one could doubt his promise to agitate the slavery ques-
tion. He followed the parliamentary debates on West Indian
emancipation and combed the speeches of Thomas Foweli
Buxton and Henry Peter Brougham for new ideas, Slowly
it dawned on him that the English abolitionists had much to
teach him. In x8z8, after years of planning, they had finally
combined into a single society for the emancipation of slavery
throughout the Empire* He hailed their achievement as "the
most stupendous scheme of benevolence that lias ever been
devised for the good of mankind" and recommended the
immediate formation of a sioiilar society in the United States*
Americans had leaders similar to William WHberforce and

BENJAMIN LUNDY 87

Thomas Clarkson — they had their Websters and Clays who
could "unquestionably put a new aspect on Europe and
America." The fate of his first anti-slavery petition quickly
taught him that nothing like the parliamentary strength of
the English abolitionists was to be found in Congress.

Two weeks after his arrival in Bennington he printed a
notice of a meeting for the purpose of preparing a petition to
Congress demanding the abolition of slavery in the District
of Columbia. Without waiting for the approval of the meet-
ing he hastily printed a petition and mailed it to every post-
master in the state together with the request that it be re-
turned with as many signatures as possible before the middle
of December. The petition stated that the signers deemed it
unnecessary to prove in detail the inconsistency of slavery
with the principles of American government and the spirit of
Christianity, and that while they admitted that Congress had'
no power to legislate on slavery in the states, they earnestly
prayed that it might remove the cancer "from the vitals of the
republic." On January 26, 1829, Garrison's petition, bearing
the names of two thousand three hundred and fifty-two
citizens of Vermont, appeared before the House Committee
for the District of Columbia.

Meanwhile, on January <5, 1829, Representative Charles
Miner of Pennsylvania took the floor with resolutions that
instructed the Committee for the District of Columbia to
consider the feasibility of abolishing the slave trade in the
District. Garrison followed the subsequent debates closely,
even scrutinizing the voting lists, and when he discovered that
three New Engenders — James W. Ripley of Maine, Jonathan
Harvey of New Hampshire, and Rollin G Mallary of Ver-
mont — had opposed the resolution, he opened fire with one of
the bitterest attacks of his editorial career. Who were these
poltroons, he asked, these sanctimonious hypocrites who

88 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

quoted the Bible to prove that might makes right and that it
was right to destroy the souls of their fellow men?

Are we — in the Fifty Third Year of the Independence of the
United States — are we to gravely discuss the question, whether
all men are born free and equal as if it were a new doctrine? Are
we to learn, whether the colored of our race are really brutes
or human beings? Whether they have bodies capable of suffering,
or souls which can never die? Whether it is consistent with the
principles of our government to shackle some of our species with
galling chains, and to mar their image by applying the whip and
the brand? Or whether it is criminal to traffic in human flesh, or
degrading to buy and sell in a national capacity?12

Garrison chose the phrases "colored of our race" and "some

of our species" to show that his case for universal brotherhood
rested on the belief in a single creation* God had created all
men at the same moment, and they were all equally His
children* From this faith in equality he never retreated^ even
when nineteenth-century science lent its support to the theory
of the multiple creation of races.

Ripley and Mallary, the "dough-faces'7 who stood accused,
protested against such uncivil treatment; but he refused to give
an inch and sneered at their contention that Northern agita-
tion of the slavery question would merely destroy Southern
good will "So! we must continue to traffic in human flesh,
and multiply our victims, and perpetuate the damning stain
of oppression, in a national capacity, because an attempt to
remove the disgrace would again rouse up the advocates of
slavery! Good God! is this the language of a representative
from New England — this his htimanityy his moral courage,
his sense of duty?"11

Presently there were other complaints about his harsh

BENJAMIN LUNDY 89

language, the Ne<w York Journal of Commerce taking the
lead in censuring him. He fought back gamely against these
"timid, half-minded, shivering4n-the~wind" editors, all of
them "contemptible animals." "Your dependent, calculating
editor is a wretched tool in the hands of designing men," he
thundered. "He sacrifices principle to interest."14 Actually,
his language had changed no more than his attitude toward
wrongdoing. He had been calling his opponents harsh names
and imputing evil motives to them ever since he started writ-
ing for Ephraim Allen. Jefferson had been a "criminal" and
John Neal a "buffoon." Unitarians were "infidels" and Sab-
bath-breakers "vicious degenerates." He did not need the
example of British abolitionists to teach him how to call a
spade a spade — he simply applied the old words to a new
sin. Privately he likened himself to the Old Testament proph-
ets Isaiah and Jeremiah, who hurled imprecations like thunder-
bolts to awaken a sleeping nation. His motives were not un-
mixed — strong language advertised both the sin and the man
brave enough to name it. But one who feared "the terrible
judgment of an incensed God" as much as he did worried
only that his words might not be strong enough.

Lundy came North again in January, 1829. In his talks with
Garrison he proposed a merger of talents: he would continue
his work with Haitian colonization, traveling and lecturing
while Garrison replaced him as resident editor of the Genius.
Garrison readily agreed. His contract was due to expire in
March, and now that the election was over his employers
had grown noticeably cool toward his abolition activities.
Besides, anti-slavery promised to be a full-time job and Lundy
an excellent teacher. The two men parted, agreeing to join-
forces as soon as both were ready. On March 27, 1829, Garri-
son published his third valedictory.

90 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

To my apprehension the subject of slavery involves interest of
a greater moment to our welfare as a republic, and demands a
more prudent and minute investigation, than any other which
has come before the American people since the Revolutionary
struggle — than all others which now occupy their attention. „ . .
It is true, many a cheek burns with shame in view of our national
inconsistency, and many a heart bleeds for the miserable African;
it is true examples of disinterested benevolence and individual
sacrifices are numerous, particularly in the Southern States; but
no systematic* vigorous and successful measures have been made
to overthrow this fabric of oppression. I trust in God that I may
be the humble instrument of breaking at least one chain, and re-
storing one captive to liberty: it will amply repay a life of severe
toil

Now there could be no turning back. In April he returned
to Boston to await Lundy's call

5
The Road to Prison

IN BOSTON ONCE MORE Garrison found himself in "some-
what of a hobble, in a pecuniary point of view" and
made straight for Collier's, where he was sure of free room
and board. No sooner had he settled there than his financial
embarrassment grew acute — he was served with a warrant
for failing to attend the annual muster of the Newburyport
militia. Five years before in a sudden burst of patriotism he
had joined the local company, although he had never bothered
to train. Now, with his newly acquired pacifist scruples, he re-
solved to pay the fine. But with what? He sat down and wrote
to his friend Jacob Horton in Newburyport confessing that
he hadn't so much as a farthing and asking Horton for eight
dollars to rescue him from his "unpleasant dilemma/'1 Thus
began the habit of indiscriminate borrowing which marked
his financial dealings for the next forty years, most of them
spent just one jump ahead of his creditors. He spent money
freely; when it was gone, he sent his pride uon a pilgrimage to
Mecca" and touched his friends for loans. Sometimes he paid
them back, but just as often they wrote his debts off as good
investments in reform. He never mastered the intricate fi-
nances of the Liberator, whose accounts finally became so
jumbled that it took a committee of unusually patient friends
to unsnarl them. Eventually Ms colleagues came to recognize

92 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

in him the reformer bent on directing other people's lives but
requiring no small amount of managing himself.

He discovered that the National Philanthropist was being
edited by William Goodell, the hard-eyed evangelical re-
former from Providence destined to be first an invaluable ally
and then a dangerous enemy. Garrison helped with the press-
work, and in the evenings, after a day at the composing desk,
took his friend on long walks through Boston, talking all the
while about Lundy and slavery. In conversations lasting long
Into the night they swapped ideas for organizing anti-slavery
in New England. Their ignorance helped to reduce the ques-
tion to the manageable proportions of Christian conduct. If
the gospel spelled equality before God, if the Declaration of
Independence proclaimed equality before the law, then how
could slaveholders be both Christians and democrats? If Chris-
tianity and Infidelity were incompatible, where was the middle
ground between democracy and slavery?

From the outset Garrison^ hatred of slavery was an abstract
concern centered exclusively on the contradiction of bondage
in a free society. He did not need to know how slavery
worked in order to condemn it. Slavery was evil, and evil
could never produce good — it was that simple. He won
Goodell over to this view just as Lundy had converted him.
When the National Philanthropist folded in August, 1829,
Goodell returned to New York to spread his friend's ideas
and help form a national anti-slavery society*

In June, 1829, Garrison accepted an invitation from the
American Colonization Society to deliver the annual Fourth
of July address in Park Street Church. Here was what he had
been waiting for, his first chance, at twenty-three, to reach a
wider audience than the handful of reformers who gathered
at Collier's. Carefully he drafted his speech, revising it again
and again until it satisfied him* It was a long address — too

THE ROAD TO PRISON 93

long, he admitted, for easy listening but barely sufficient to do
justice to his momentous subject. He trembled at the thought
of speaking before an audience that "bids fair to be over-
whelming." John Pierpont had composed an ode for the occa-
sion, and Whittier and Goodell promised to attend; but most
of his listeners would be members of the staid Congregational
Society prepared to accept colonization as an unpleasant duty
but not even remotely interested in abolition. For these faint-
hearted he promised some "severe animadversions" that might
offend "though not reasonably."2

His sponsor, the American Colonization Society, symbol-
ized the confusion of American thinking on slavery before
1830. The philosophy of the colonizationists developed logi-
cally out of the equivocal views of the Revolutionary gener-
ation and its chief spokesman, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson
hated slavery both in principle and in fact. He believed that
even if it were proven that Negroes were inherently inferior
to whites, it did not follow that slavery was either just or
right — "whatever be their degree of talent, it is no measure
of their rights" Yet he was by no means sure that the Negro
was inferior. He set out to study the race carefully, observing
their actions and accomplishments, seeking information where-
ever he could find it on the mental capacities of both slaves
and freedmen. The further he pursued his investigations, how-
ever, the more certain he grew of the inferiority of the Negro.
He was convinced that "the whole commerce between master
and slave is a perpetual exercise in the most boisterous pas-
sions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part and
degrading submission on the other," and that "the blacks,
whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time
and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in endowments
of both mind and body."8 It was impossible for both races to
live together. The only solution lay in educating the Negro,

94 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

preparing him for self-government, and then returning him
to his native Africa. In Jefferson's mind, as in the view of the
American Colonization Society of which he approved, benev-
olence and expediency joined hands,

Jefferson's opinion of the Negro was widely shared by the
churchmen of his generation, who in general displayed more
concern for the sensitivity of slaveholders than for the condi-
tion of their slaves. They agreed with the Jeffcrsonian hu-
manitarians that the Negro was totally unfit for democratic
society and feared lest an ignorant and vicious colored popu-
lation destroy white freedom. They thought of colonization
as a kind of national blood purge, drastic therapy to restore
the health of the body politic. The American Colonization
Society was an offspring of the mating of these vague Chris-
tian sentiments with the instinct for national self-preservation,
a sickly child of eighteenth-century philanthropy. Jefferson's
generation could never bring itself to believe in the "self-
evident truths" of racial equality proclaimed in the Declara-
tion of Independence, and the American clergy had never
troubled themselves with such a pernicious abstraction to be-
gin with. It was left to another age — the ante-bellum gener-
ation of Garrison and his abolitionists — to apply the truth of
equality literally.

Efforts in behalf of colonization dated from 1800, when the
Virginia Assembly in secret session passed a resolution em-
powering the governor to correspond with the President of
rthe United States "on the subject of purchasing lands without
the Hmits of this State, whither persons obnoxious to the laws
or dangerous to the peace of society may be removed/1 Jef-
ferson responded enthusiastically to the Virginia proposal
and suggested that in the event that no suitable haven could
be found on the North American continent, "Africa would
oifer a last and undoubted resort/*4 He corresponded with

THE ROAD TO PRISON 95

the British government and the governors of Sierra Leone,
and even considered the newly purchased Louisiana territory
as a possible asylum for the blacks. There the matter rested,
however, until 1816, when General Charles Mercer, one of
the original architects of the Virginia plan, pledged himself
to revive the secret resolutions of 1800 and set colonization
in motion.5

On January i, 1817, the American Colonization Society
held its first election of officers. Bushrod Washington was
elected president, and vice-presidencies were scattered among
twelve members from nine states. Lest there be any misunder-
standing among the members as to the purpose of the Society,
Henry Clay, a charter member and vice-president, reminded
his colleagues at the first session that "it was not proposed to
deliberate upon or consider at all, any question of emancipa-
tion, or that which was connected with the abolition of slav-
ery." Upon that condition alone, he continued, the many
gentlemen present from the South and West had attended and
could be expected to cooperate.6 John Randolph quickly
echoed Clay's admonition, adding that "it had not been suffi-
ciently insisted on with a view to obtain the cooperation of
all the citizens of the United States, not only that this meeting
does not in any wise affect the question of Negro Slavery, but,
as far as it goes, must materially tend to secure the property of
every master in the United States over his slaves."7 The So-
ciety at the outset limited itself to the removal of the "idle,
vicious and degraded blacks" who "sally forth from their
coverts, beneath the obscurity of night and plunder the rich
proprietors of the valleys" or "infest the suburbs of towns and
cities."8 The Northern clergy joined in declaring the free
Negro a national menace, and these opinions soon received
the official sanction of the society. At the seventh annual
meeting of the society in 1823 Robert Goodloe Harper sum-

96 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

marized the objects of colonization as first, the relief from a
population "pregnant with future danger and present in-
convenience," second, the removal of "a great public evil,"

and finally, the diffusion of "the blessings of knowledge and
freedom on a continent that now contains 150 millions of
people, plunged in all the degradation of idolatry, superstition,
and ignorance,"9 Just how the degraded freeclman would
Christianize a dark continent and enlighten its inhabitants
neither Harper nor his fellow colonizationists cared to say.

Despite the roseate predictions of its founder the achieve-
ments of the Colonization Society in its first dozen years were
not impressive. Between 1820 and 1830 only 1420 Negroes
were returned to Africa. Until 1827 all the emigrants were
free Negroes; after that date the number included slaves who
had received their freedom on condition that they be de-
ported. The expenditures of the society for this decade
amounted to $106,367.72, or roughly seventy-five dollars for
every Negro deported- The Upper South led in the number
of emigrants, Virginia sending 580 and North Carolina, 400-
South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi, where slavery was
most profitable, sent a combined total of 73 deportees, Of the
first consignment of 84 blacks expatriated in 1820, 24 died*
The mortality rate for Negroes transported during the rainy
season continued to be one in four, while for those lucky
enough to be deported in the dry season it was one in six*10
By 1829 Southerners were justly complaining of the cruel
absurdity of the scheme and Northerners of its effects in
strengthening slavery. Both were right. In trying to be all
things to all men the Colonization Society had succeeded only
in entangling its members in a monstrous contradiction; their
humanitarianism had fashioned an inefficient and inhuman
system. This was the institution that requested Garrison's serv-
ices on July 4, 1829.

THE ROAD TO PRISON 97

The Park Street address contained the germ of almost every
argument Garrison ever used. The occasion was a coloniza-
tion meeting but the speaker was already an abolitionist. He
began by defining slavery as a national sin and turned immedi-
ately to an indictment of American religion. What was Chris-
tianity doing for the nation? It explored the isles of the seas
in search of converts but ignored the slave languishing in
misery at home. It formed charities into golden links of be-
nevolence but allowed the black man to perish in iron chains.
Could Christians contend with cannibals and yet be conquered
by their own children? "I will say, finally, that I despair of
the Republic while slavery exists therein. . . . our destruction
is not only possible but almost certain."11

Suppose, he went on, that by a miracle all the slaves were
suddenly made white? What would his audience do then?
"Would you shut your eyes upon their sufferings, and calmly
talk of constitutional limitations?" To keep men in chains be-
cause of their color was beneath contempt. "This is their
country by birth, not by adoption. Their children possess
the same inherent and unalienable rights as ours, and it is a
crime of the blackest dye to load them with fetters." The
occasion was the fifty-third anniversary of the signing of the
Declaration of Independence and a time to remind Americans
of the glaring contradiction between their creed and their
actions. "In view of it I am ashamed of my country. I am
sick of our unmeaning declarationan praise of liberty and
equality, of our hypocritical cant about the unalienable rights
of man."

This was not the language of moderation so dear to the
Colonization Society, but an appeal to higher law that could
prove fatal to the spirit of good will it celebrated. When he
spoke of "sacred principles," Garrison meant nothing less
than a body of moral truths so distinct and compelling as to

98 THE LIBERATOR! WILLIAM LLOYDGARRISON

peed no proof. Far from being a philosopher, he was not even
fa very logical thinker: his habit of avoiding intellectual com-
plexities was already deeply ingrained. All of his ethical ideas,
grounded as they were in a profound anti-intellectual bias,
proved impervious to analysis, but as he explained them now
they seemed simple and self-evident,

The foundation of his moral system was an unshakable faith
in a supreme law of God binding everywhere and at all times.
He believed that this same divine law manifested itself in the
revelations of the Bible and in the reason of men. Since all
law began in the immutable will of God it followed that
divine law and the law of nature were really one and the same
command. In the final judgment all man-made law — all hu-
man conduct — had to be tested by the divine standard. It
mattered little, therefore, whether slavery was measured by
Biblical precept or the "self-evident" truths of the Declara-
tion of Independence. In either case it failed of God's ap-
proval All men, individually and collectively, could judge
when their actions harmonized with higher law, but the best
guide to the moral life was the individual conscience. In ap-
pealing directly to this moral sense in each of his listeners
Garrison was in effect inviting them to practice a kind of
philosophical anarchy. He was aware only of making piety
rather than utility the standard of human conduct, but those
of his listeners who were wiser than he recognized his words
for what they were — a plea for Christian perf ection*

As a child of light he conceived of the religious sense as the
universal property of mankind* This religious sense, which
he thought of simply as an awareness of divine presence,
directed men through their consciences. It was conscience
alone that gave men their unique dignity, defined them as
humans and determined their worth. Once they understood
the divine purpose they could carry out God's promises of a

THE ROAD TO PRISON 99

final triumph of righteousness over sin, life over death, spirit
over matter. Slaveholders, by refusing to acknowledge this
human quality in the Negro, denied the fundamental religious
sense of mankind. They were practicing atheists. Slavery
could thus be explained as the willful repudiation of God's
commands by unbelievers. For the flouting of divine law
Garrison held the slaveowner directly responsible; in his
view the master was an evil man who had closed his heart to
the word of God. The sinner embodied the sin. It was just this
identification of the sinner with the sin that troubled his
colonization audience, who saw slavery as an incidental so-
cial evil best cured by removing the Negro. They were not
prepared to grant his cardinal principle — that slavery was
"inhumane" because it denied to Negroes the dignity of men
— nor could they accept his reading of the Declaration of
Independence.

As he produced it for the examination of his audience the
Declaration of Independence emerged not as an elaborate
metaphysical discussion but as a simple, common-sense ap-
proximation of the law of God. He was oblivious to the
dangers of identifying reason with revelation or Scripture
with natural rights. He only knew that the rights of life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness spoke to the rational
faculties of men just as God's word appealed to the universal
religious sense. Somehow — he was not sure how — the Bible
and the Declaration fused into a mystical corpus of higher
law, the "injunctions of Holy Writ" upheld "the common
dictates of humanity."

In citing Scripture as the final authority against slavery he
did not mean to include all of the Old Testament or even
those parts of the New which appeared to sanction slavery.
The trouble with plenary inspiration, he had discovered, was
that it solved nothing. To every passage exhorting Christians

loo THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

to proclaim liberty to the captives, slaveholders could counter
with Paul's injunction to treat one's slaves mercifully. The
truth was that Garrison was launched on a process of interpre-
tative reading of the Bible that could only end in the rejection
of all Scripture except the gospel of Jesus. The Park Street
address took an advanced position against the pro-slavery
forces from which there was no retreat.

He closed his two-hour performance with an appeal to the
churches. "Let them pour out their supplications to Heaven
in behalf of the slave. Prayer is omnipotent: its breath can
melt the adamantine rocks, its touch can break the stoutest
chains." In years to come his bitter and unreasoning hatred
of the American churches puzzled and offended his more
moderate followers who never understood how great had
been his initial belief in their efficacy. In 1829 he was certain
that once Christian opinion was brought to bear on slavery
it would not survive another day. Let Christians awake, there-
fore, and arm for a holy contest. "I call upon the churches of
the living God to lead this great enterprise. If the soul be
immortal, priceless, save it from remediless woe."

Most of Garrison's audience thought this note of alarm ill-
considered and premature. What was it this young man said
about disunion — "the fault is not ours if a separation eventu-
ally take place"? If, as they devoutly believed, the American
political genius was most perfectly expressed in the art of
accommodation and compromise, then here was the kind of
misguided zeal the society could well do without. As for his
wild notions of inaugurating a mass movement against slavery,
they could do without this too. The Park Street address,
though it excited misgivings among the colonizationists,
scarcely stirred the millpond surface of Boston society*
Goodell dutifully reported the speech in the failing National
Philanthropist, but before Garrison realized how Httle he had

THE ROAD TO PRISON IOI

impressed the city, Lundy's call came and he hurried off to
Baltimore,

Lundy had already announced the new partnership and
recommended his colleague as a man "in every way qualified"
as an anti-slavery crusader. No sooner did Garrison appear,
however, than he began to object to colonization, explaining
to Lundy that since July he had had some sobering second
thoughts on the justice of exporting the Negroes either to
Africa or to Haiti. The whole scheme, he announced, looked
like a fraudulent device for stamping the Negro with the mark
of inferiority. He was sure now that nothing short of total and
immediate emancipation would satisfy the demands of Chris-
tian behavior. Would this opinion obstruct Lundy's Haitian
project and could the two men consent to disagree? "Well,"
Lundy replied, "thee may put thy initials to thy articles, and
I will put my initials to mine, and each will bear his own
burden." "Very well, that will answer," Garrison rejoined,
"and I will be able to free my soul."

He boarded with Lundy at the home of two Quaker ladies
in Market Street, where he met with a new kind of religious
reformer. Most of Lundy's friends and associates were Quak-
ers and free Negroes — John Needles, a devout Friend who
had helped Lundy and would help Garrison in the future,
William Watltins, Jacob Greener and his sons, free Negroes
and better enemies of the Colonization Society. The atmos-
phqre in Market Street differed sharply from the professional
air in Collier's nest of reformers, for Lundy's friends exhibited
little of the studied benevolence and organizational zeal of
the Boston evangelicals. Their practical piety and simple ways
contrasted markedly with the smugness and self-assurance of
the new arrival It was not long before Garrison saw that
these quiet people with their apostoMc ideas of love and sense
of personal cooun&meat had much to teach him*

IO2 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

In September the two editors set to work supplying the
Genius of Universal Emancipation with a new face. The
paper, enlarged and expanded, now appeared every week.
Beneath an American eagle perched on the masthead stood
Garrison's motto, the quotation from the Declaration of Inde-
pendence proclaiming the equality of all men. For the first
time in his career he was free from the arduous work of type-
setting and proofreading. The Genius was commissioned to
the Baltimore firm of Lucas and Deaver, printers obliging
enough to accept the work on credit.

From the beginning it was clear that the two men had
agreed to go their own ways. Lundy launched a series of
articles on Haiti describing in radiant terms the condition of
the expatriates there. He explained that the situation was much
improved over the three years previous: Haitian proprietors
were gradually becoming reconciled to granting emigrants
land, and the government was beginning to take an active
interest in their welfare. "There the color of their skin will
not be looked upon as a mark of degradation," Lundy wrote.
Happily surveying the cloudless skies over Haiti he ignored
the storm his young associate was busy brewing right in
Baltimore. Garrison had elected to settle his accounts with
the Colonization Society in his opening editorial.

He approached his subject by the devious route of praise.
No one, he declared, was a truer friend to the Colonization
Society than he. But the work of colonization was exceed-
ingly dilatory and uncertain. "Viewed as an auxiliary, it de-
serves encouragement; but as a remedy it is altogether in-
adequate." The results of ten years' work were far from
encouraging. "For my own part, I do not believe that the
removal of the great body of the blacks can be effected by
voluntary contributions or individual sacrifice; and if we de-
pend alone upon the efforts of colonization societies, slavery

THE ROAD TO PRISON

will never be exterminated." In place of the ambiguous phrases
of the society he offered the following propositions:

1. That the slaves are entitled to immediate and complete
emancipation: consequently, to hold them longer in bond-
age is both tyrannical and unnecessary.

2. That the question of expediency has nothing to do with
that of right, and it is not for those who tyrannise to say
when they may safely break the chains of their sub-
jects. . . .

3. That, on the ground of expediency, it would be wiser to
set all the slaves free to-day than tomorrow — or next
week than next year. To think of removing them all out
of the land is visionary. . . . Hence, the sooner they re-
ceive the benefits of instruction, the better for them and
us. We can educate two millions of slaves, now, with
more facility and success than four millions at the expira-
tion of twenty-five years. Give them liberation, and every
inducement to revolt is removed; give them employment
as free laborers, and their industry will be more produc-
tive and beneficial than mines of gold; give them religious
and secular instruction, restrict them with suitable regula-
tions, and they will make peaceable citizens. . . .

4. That, as a very large proportion of our colored population
were born on American soil, they are at liberty to choose
their own dwelling place, and we possess no right to use
coercive measures in their removal.12

As with so many of Garrison's later pronunciamentos the
editorial clarity was more apparent than real. "Immediate and
complete emancipation" — what did it mean? In spite of his
temerity he did not know. Thus the phrase "suitable regula-
tions," which signified that he had no plan, that all plans were
matters of mere "expediency" with which he need not con-
cern himself. He was concerned solely with the abolition of

IOA THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

the status of slavery. What followed then, whether appren-
ticeship, forced labor, copyhold, progressive enfranchisement,
mattered little. Let Americans admit that slavery was a sin,
he seemed to be saying, and they would find a solution. Be-
hind all his radical statements lurked the old evangelical argu-
ment that God in His infinite mercy and wisdom would find
a way if only men believed in Him. But this was mere equivo-
cation. Did Garrison mean to raise the slaves to full citizen-
ship in one bold stroke? Or did he contemplate an indefinite
period of education and preparation? How were Negroes to
be trained for "productive'' labor and the duties of freemen?
How long would they be second-class citizens? Would they
be the wards of the state or the responsibility of the federal
government? As yet these questions were hypothetical; some-
day they would become real and need answers. "Immediate
emancipation" followed by "suitable regulations" was not
freedom but slavery under another name. Yet without some
plan or method immediate emancipation was only a cruel
joke. In his haste to disown the Colonization Society he failed
to recognize this dilemma. It seemed to him that only the
principle mattered. "If justice requires instant abolition, then
surely it is proper to obey its mandates. Don't talk of expedi-
ency as an off set; as if it were expedient to persevere in crime,
year after year! Never ... do evil, that good may come.""
Beyond this Christian precept he was not prepared to venture.
Garrison was not the first of the American abolitionists to
espouse immediate emancipation. Probably the first American
advocate of immediatism was George Bourne, an English
emigrant who settled in New York City after seven years of
observing slavery at first hand in Virginia, Bourne's chief
work, The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable, which appeared
in 1815, was an uncompromising indictment of slavery which
even Garrison's could not surpass. Bourne leveled his axgu-

THE ROAD TO PRISON 105

ments directly at the personality of the slaveholder. "Every
man who holds Slaves and who pretends to be a Christian or
Republican," he protested, "is either an incurable Idiot who
cannot distinguish good from evil, or an obdurate sinner who
resolutely defies every social, moral and divine requisition.'714

Beside this fiery arraignment Garrison's declaration in the
Genius of Universal Emancipation seems like pale copy. Al-
though Garrison never admitted a debt to Bourne's pamphlet,
it would be strange indeed if a convert with his literary tastes
who pored over Congressional and Parliamentary debates and
studied the works of abolitionist pioneers had not read it by
1829. Another argument for immediate emancipation with
which Garrison may have been familiar was James Duncan's
Treatise on Slavery, printed in Indiana in 1824. Duncan con-
demned gradual manumission as "moral turpitude," and, like
Bourne before him, prescribed immediate emancipation as the
only sure remedy for "heinous sin."

If by "immediate emancipation" Garrison meant only the
immediate adoption of laws providing for gradual emancipa-
tion, priority is even less his due. There were a host of anti-
slavery pioneers before his entrance into the field who had
advocated one form or another of immediate anti-slavery
legislation. In 1812 Amos Stoddard strongly urged the pas-
sage of laws for freeing the post nati. A few years later Est-
wick Evans proposed that the federal government purchase
all slaves and grant them their freedom when they had worked
out their purchase price. Various other plans for immediate
action were offered after 1815 by John Adams, John Jay,
Daniel Raymond, Edward Settle, and Samuel Sewall. Thus
by 1829 immediate emancipation, though by no means a
widely shared doctrine, had been propounded in some form a
number of times by men every bit as zealous as Lundy's
assistant.

106 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Without stopping to examine his new principle in the light
of the actual conditions of slavery in Baltimore, he turned to
perfecting his techniques for agitating immediate abolition.
Soon he discovered a set of simple rules for indoctrinating the
American public, which he taught to a whole generation of
anti-slavery radicals. The first and most important of the
Garrisonian axioms was his command not to explain but to
denounce. "Slavery is a monster," he taught the readers of
the Genius, "and he must be treated as such — hunted down
bravely, and despatched at a blow." Next inculcate a sense
of guilt, collective and individual, by emphasizing the barbar-
ity of slavery. "We read of the dark ages, and wonder at the
depravity of mankind; yet we now defend practices, and
nourish vices which throw as disastrous an eclipse over our
land, as any that brooded over the earlier period of our
world." Then stress the disparity between American pro-
fession and American practice. "We panegyrize our freedom
and equality, as a knave boasts of his honesty, or a courtezan
of her chastity. Our Declaration of Independence declares,
that 'all men are born equal' — but it lies, in the face of heaven
and earth, if our practices are defensible; and the lie is re-
peated annually, all over the land, by a multitude of men who
make high pretensions to the truth."15 Spare neither North nor
South in your censures. "It is a solemn truth, that in New
England the free blacks have fewer privileges, and are treated
more contemptuously than those in the slave states."16 Chide
the people for their failure to perform their duty as citizens
by voting down slavery. "How have they met their responsi-
bility? By undutifully absenting themselves from the polls!
by sinking into a culpable and despairing apathy! by sur-
rendering their arms without a show of resistance! by re-
fusing to co-operate at a time when every thing valuable is at
stake."17 Finally, reprobate the lack of Christian, zeal in the

THE ROAD TO PRISON 107

American churches and denounce the ministers responsible
for this moral laxity.

With reverence, and in the name of God, we ask what sort of
religion is now extant among us? Certainly not such as cheered
the prophets through the gloom of the old dispensation . . . not
such as Jesus laid down his life to vindicate. ... It is a religion
which complacently tolerates open adultery, oppression, robbery,
and murder! seldom or never lifting up a wavering voice, or a
note of remonstrance, or propitiatory sacrifice! — a religion,
which is graduated by the corrupt, defective laws of the
State, and not by the pure, perfect laws of God! — a religion,
which quadrates with the natural depravity of the heart, giving
license to sin, restraining no lust, mortifying not the body, en-
gendering selfishness and cruelty! — a religion which walks in
'silver slippers,' on a carpeted floor, having thrown off the burden
of the cross, and changed the garments of humiliation for the
splendid vestments of pride! — a religion which has no courage,
no faithfulness, no self-denial, deeming it better to give heed unto
men than unto God! Verily, this generation will have a solemn
account to give in the great and terrible day of judgment.18

It was no accident that his formula for anti-slavery agitation
contained the ingredients of martyrdom complete with crown
of thorns. In the autumn of 1 829 the brig Francis out of New-
buryport cleared Baltimore harbor bound for New Orleans
with a cargo of slaves for the Louisiana sugar plantations. The
Francis was owned by one Francis Todd, a well-to-do New-
buryport merchant with considerable prestige and, as it turned
out, a very thin skin. Her captain was Nicholas Brown, a
Yankee skipper with a long and creditable record in the
coastal trade and a reputation as an honest and humane skip-
per. The slave cargo of the Francis was part of a total of
fifty thousand Negroes transported annually either over the
mountains or down the coast to the Gulf States. The principal

io8 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

effect in the United States of the prohibition of the inter-
national slave trade had been to increase the demand for slaves
from Virginia and Maryland. As the price of slaves rose
precipitously so did the number of slave-dealers and merchants
in the domestic trade who were not above making an occa-
sional slave voyage when business was slow. Todd was only
one of a number of New Englanders engaged in the domestic
slave trade on a part-time basis, and his cargo of eighty-eight
blacks was not particularly noteworthy. But he had the double
misfortune of hailing from Newburyport and arousing the
curiosity of his fellow townsman.

One of Garrison's innovations in the Genius of Universal
Emancipation was the "Black List," a forerunner of the "Ref-
uge of Oppression" column in the Liberator, in which he
printed examples of the barbarities of slavery — kidnappings,
whippings, murders. In the issue for November 13, 1829,
there appeared a notice of the departure of the Francis with
the editor's caustic reminder that the ship was owned by a
New England man. "So much for New England principle!"
he scoffed and promised to allude to "this damning affair"
more particularly in his next number. True to his promise, he
returned to the Todd incident determined "to cover with
thick infamy all who were concerned in this nefarious busi-
ness."1* Todd and Captain Brown he denounced as "highway
robbers and murderers," "enemies of their own species." "I
recollect," he continued, "that it was always a mystery in
Newburyport how Mr. Todd contrived to make profitable
voyages to New Orleans and other places, when other mer-
chants, with as fair an opportunity to make money, and send-
ing to the same ports at the same time, invariably made fewer
successful speculations." Now the mystery was unraveled.

Any man can gather up riches if he does not care by what means
they are obtained. The Francis carried off seventy-five slaves,

THE ROAD TO PRISON 109

chained in a narrow place between decks. Capt. Brown originally
intended to take one hundred and fifty of these unfortunate crea-
tures; but another hard-hearted shipmaster underbid him in the
price of passage for the remaining moiety.

He sent a copy of the article to the Nevuburyport Herald,
hoping that Allen would reprint it, and another to Todd
himself.

Lundy knew that Garrison's article veered dangerously
near the shoals of libel. A pungent stylist in his own right,
Lundy had nevertheless acquired the journalist's habit of stick-
ing closely to the facts, and Garrison's easy appropriation of
hearsay discomfited him sorely. This was not the first time he
had received complaints about the junior editor's language.
With not a little apprehension they waited to see what Todd
would do. He soon obliged them by filing a suit for libel. A
month later, in February, 1830, they were presented with an-
other action by the State of Maryland for "contriving and
unlawfully, wickedly, and maliciously intending to hurt, in-
jure, and vilify" the Massachusetts shipowner. Todd's civil
suit was postponed pending the outcome of the state's action
at law.

The trial in which Lundy and Garrison were co-defendants
was held on the first day of March, 1830, before Judge
Nicholas Brice in the Baltimore City Court. The editors were
fortunate in securing the counsel of an able young lawyer of
liberal sympathies, Charles Mitchell, who offered his services
without charge. Witnesses for the prosecution included
Todd's Baltimore agent, the pilot of the Francis, a customs
officer, and the printers of the Geniw. Attempts by Lundy
and Garrison to limit the indictment to specific counts and
their demands for articles of proof of libelous intent were
unavailing. Garrison's editorial was admitted just as he had
written it. The prosecution showed that whereas there were

HO THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

eighty-eight, not seventy-five, slaves aboard the Francis, none
of them had been chained, but all of them allowed their free-
dom below decks, and that they had received humane treat-
ment and had even been permitted to hold daily prayer
meetings. Further evidence was offered to show that Captain
Brown enjoyed a reputation for kindness in the trade, and that
Todd, disliking the business of carrying human cargo, had
only agreed to the contract because, as he put it, "freights
were dull, times hard, and money scarce." The prosecuting
attorney closed his case by pointing out that no law had been
broken by Todd and Brown and that only Garrison's fanati-
cism and virulence could explain his attack.

Now if Garrison had possessed the instincts of a true re-
porter, he might have checked the real story of the loading of
the Francis and uncovered the facts which could have cleared
him. Subsequent investigation revealed that the Negroes, terri-
fied at the prospect of joining slave gangs in Louisiana, had
escaped to the nearby woods, where they were finally recap-
tured and driven half naked and panic-stricken back to the
ship. Without this damaging evidence Mitchell could only
defend his clients in terms of higher law and attempt to play
on the sympathies of the jury. Eloquence was not enough: it
took the jury just fifteen minutes to return a verdict of guilty.
A motion for a new trial was denied, and a judgment rendered
fining Garrison, now identified as the sole author of the of-
fending editorial, fifty dollars and costs. Since he lacked the
money to pay his fine and the usually resourceful Lundy
failed him, he had no choice but to accept a jail sentence of
six months. On April 17, with the inmates' cries of "Fresh
fish!" ringing in his ears, he strode into the Baltimore Jail
calmly prepared to exploit his imprisonment to the fullest.

Lundy had been forced to suspend the Genius while he
helped his friend fight the libel suit. He defended Garrison

THE ROAD TO PRISON III

to the end, insisting that while there were many of his edi-
torials that had not met with his approval, Garrison had never
deliberately flouted his wishes. As for their personal relation-
ship, "we have ever cherished for each other the kindliest
feelings and mutual personal regard. It would be superfluous
in me to say that he has proven himself a faithful and able
coadjutor in the great and holy cause in which we are en-
gaged. — Even his enemies will admit it."20 Garrison apolo-
gized neither to Lundy nor to his readers. His only regret, he
announced, was that so far his views on immediate emancipa-
tion had been "imperfectly developed" and that, concerned
with the "cares and perplexities of the establishment," he had
not succeeded in making his position absolutely clear. "I have
used strong, indignant, vehement language, and direct, scorch-
ing reproof. I have nothing to recall"21

Life behind bars began pleasantly enough, as the following
bit of calculated playfulness written to Harriet Farnham Hor-
ton clearly shows:

Baltimore Jail
May 12, 1830

, . . I am as meek as any occupant of a ten-foot building in
our great Babel ... It is true, I am not the owner of this huge
pile, nor the grave lord-keeper of it; but then, I pay no rent —
am bound to make no repairs — and enjoy the luxury of inde-
pendence divested of its cares. ... I sing as often, and quite as
well as I did before my wings were clipped.

To change the figure: here I strut the lion of the day, and, of
course, attract a great number of visitors, as the exhibition is
gratuitous — so that, between the labors of my brain, the conver-
sation of my friends, and the ever changing curiosities of this
huge menagerie, time flies away astonishingly swift. Indeed, so
perfectly agreeable is my confinement, that I have no occasion
to call upon my philosophy or patience. . . ,22

112 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Given the freedom of the huge jail, he spent much of his
time wandering about the corridors and chatting with the
other prisoners. His meals he took with the warden and his
family. Lundy came often to discuss plans, bringing with him
Isaac Knapp, Garrison's old friend, who had arrived from
Boston to help Lundy until Garrison was released. One of the
daily occurrences in the jail was the visit of the slave-traders
to buy Negroes, slave or free, who had been collected over-
night. On one occasion Garrison confronted a master who
came to reclaim his slave and spent an enjoyable hour arguing
the merits of Noah's curse as proof of the divine sanction of
slavery. He won the debate but lost the case. It was satisfying
to give his return address as Baltimore Jail, and though he now
and again gave way to his longings to return to New England
— "that paradise of our fallen world" — his chief worry was
that he might be released before he had time to publicize his

"incarceration."

First on the promotional agenda came an account of the
trial itself, an eight-page pamphlet entitled A Brief Sketch of
the Trial of William Lloyd Garrison, for an Alleged Libel of
one Francis Todd, of Massachusetts, which he dashed off in
the space of a week to call the attention of the world to
Maryland justice. After expatiating on the unfairness of the
proceedings and the vindictiveness of the prosecutor at length
he arrived at his central theme — himself . If Judge Brice
thought he had stifled a public nuisance, he was wrong. "So
long as a good Providence gives me strength and intellect, I
will not cease to declare that the existence of slavery is a foul
reproach to the American name. ... I am only in the
alphabet of my task; time shall perfect a useful work." He
cited in his defense the civil rights guaranteed in the Consti-
tution, stalking horses he would ride for thirty-five years.
"I think it will appear," he concluded in a sudden shift to

THE ROAD TO PRISON 113

understatement, "that freedom of the press has been invaded,
and that power and not justice, has convicted me."

When he tired of letter-writing and moral strictures, there
was the Byronic gesture of inscribing a sonnet on the walls of
his cell exalting the "immortal MIND" and its victory over
massive bolts and iron grates. Meanwhile Lundy attended to
the distribution of the pamphlet, and by June was able to re-
port that over one hundred newspapers and periodicals had
praised the dauntless young editor who dared to tell the truth
about slavery.

One day early in June, Lundy appeared at the jail with the
money for Garrison's fine and a letter from Arthur Tappan,
the New York philanthropist. Tappan had read Garrison's
sketch of the trial with a deepening hatred of slavery. He
paid the fine and donated another hundred dollars to help
revive the Genius, which he said was much needed "to hold up
to American freemen, in all its naked deformity, the subject
of slavery.'m On June 5, forty-nine days after he first entered
the jail, Garrison walked serenely out of the yard, pleased
with the thought of returning to Boston but even more satis-
fied with his first small offering on the altar of freedom.

6
Launching the Liberator

GARRISON HEADED NORTH in June, 1830, with a letter of
recommendation from Lundy and just enough pocket
money to get to Boston. He was determined to organize an
anti-slavery society as soon as possible, but that took money
and friends. Thanks to advance publicity his name was al-
ready known in reform circles in Boston and New York. Rid-
ing the lumbering coaches northward from Baltimore, he
decided to capitalize on his stroke of good luck in winning the
notice of the influential Arthur Tappan by calling on his
benefactor in person.

Arthur Tappan, the man who paid Garrison's fine and
helped finance the Liberator, dominated the American reform
movement in 1830 as no single individual after him. A native
of Northampton, Massachusetts, he had been raised on the
Yankee precepts of holiness and thrift. In 1815 at the age of
twenty-nine he established a dry-goods emporium at No. 162
Pearl Street in New York City. When a sudden influx of
Manchester cottons flooded the market and swept the new
firm into bankruptcy, Tappan turned his reputation for prob-
ity to good account by shifting to French silks and quickly
built a thriving business on the untried policy of low prices
and cash payments. With the sizable profits from his venture
he began to finance the American millennium — Bible and

LAUNCHING THE LIBERATOR

tract societies, the free church movement, schools for Ne-
groes, a female rescue league, the temperance cause, and
Christian journalism. In an age of associations he was the
prince of joiners — a member of the United Domestic Mis-
sionary Society, the Young Men's Missionary Society, an
honorary director of the New York Evangelical Missionary
Society, a liberal supporter of the American Tract Society, to
which he gave the initial sum of twenty thousand dollars at its
formation, a patron of the American Bible Society, in whose
name he established one hundred scholarships at Yale. An-
other of his projects was the Magdalen Society of New York,
an "Asylum for Females who Deviated from Paths of Virtue,"
and still another, the Journal of Commerce, a newspaper run
on Christian principles with which to fight the liquor traffic,
prostitution, circuses, and the theater. As a strict Sabbatarian he
always made sure the presses stopped running promptly at
midnight on Saturday.1

When Garrison first called on him Tappan was already
famous as the patron saint of the evangelical crusade, a sharp
critic of slavery, and the adviser of religious reformers all over
the country. The machinery of New York's "Great Eight"
was powered largely by funds supplied by Arthur Tappan &
Company. From his cubicle in the center of the store he kept
the wheels of his numerous engines of reform turning by
drafting the necessary money orders and consulting with the
host of Christian workers who came to him for advice. He
kept no records of his donations and seldom mentioned them
to others. Each morning he opened his store with a prayer
meeting, and at noon when his clerks put down their bolts
of cloth for lunch, he retired to his desk to munch a soda
cracker and sip a glass of water while contemplating his
weightier tasks jba the vineyard of the Lord. Behind his grave

1 1 6 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

exterior, his formal courtesy and self-effacing manner there
lurked the passion of a true believer.

Tappan had supported the American Colonization Society
for several years until he learned that rum and gunpowder
were being shipped to the settlers in Liberia, whereupon he
indignantly withdrew his aid. These doubts soon led to others,
and when he read Garrison's attacks on the society in the
Genius he was converted to abolition. He told Daniel
Webster, who sought his help in founding a state colonization
society in Massachusetts, that he was no longer interested in
colonization, "for I see that it originated in a plan to get rid
of the free negroes in order to render slavery more secure, and
I will have nothing more to do with it."2 Once he abandoned
colonization he was determined to destroy it. It was he who
urged Garrison on to a war of extermination against the
society, writing to him of his desire to see more argument
in the Liberator "to show THE IMPOSSIBILITY of the Coloniza-
tion Society's ever effecting the entire removal of our colored
slave population"® Yet with characteristic humility Tappan
credited Garrison, "that distinguished and fearless philan-
thropist," with converting him to immediate emancipation.4

Arthur Tappan and his choleric brother Lewis, an equally
devoted abolitionist, were surprised and favorably impressed
with the meekness of the stormy petrel from Baltimore. "His
appearance and deportment at that time," Lewis recalled,
"were not likely to be forgotten. His manly form, buoyant
spirit, and countenance beaming with conscious rectitude,
attracted the attention of all those who witnessed his intro-
duction to Mr. Tappan."5 Garrison recounted his experiences
in jail and confided to the brothers his hope of winning the
forthcoming civil suit with Todd by uncovering new evidence
in Newburyport. Arthur promised his help, and the next day
Garrison set out for Boston. Although he succumbed to the

LAUNCHING THE LIBERATOR II J

young editor's infectious zeal, Tappan was by no means con-
vinced of Garrison's fitness for publicizing the anti-slavery
cause. He had read those blazing editorials in the Genius
signed "W.L.G." and did not like their severity. Who knew
what this firebrand might do once he was free from Lundy's
chastening influence? He decided to wait and see.

Meanwhile Garrison, heartened by his interview with Tap-
pan, returned to Newburyport to find the town nearly as cold
on the subject of slavery as Baltimore. Ephraim Allen and his
other friends urged him to give up his dream of reviving the
Genius and settle to a less dangerous occupation. He could
not possibly win the libel suit, they argued, so why not admit
failure and come home? Their proposals fell on deaf ears —
in July, after scouring the town in vain for new evidence, he
was back in Baltimore awaiting the trial.

During this flying trip to New England he toyed with the
idea of establishing his own newspaper. Working for Lundy
cramped his form — what he wanted was a paper whose
editorial policy would be his alone. One evening in August he
sat down at his desk in the boardinghouse and put his thoughts
on paper. Since his primary object would be the abolition of
slavery, Washington seemed the obvious place to establish
the paper, for there he could examine slavery from every
angle. "In its investigation, I shall use great plainness of
speech" he paused to underscore the phrase, "believing that
truth can never conduce to mischief and is best discovered by
plain words"*

So pleased was he with his prospectus that he made several
copies, one of which he mailed to Arthur Tappan, who sent
back a favorable reply and a check. Thus began a relation-
ship which, despite Tappan's growing misgivings as to Garri-
son's competence, helped support the Liberator and its editor
through the first years of a troubled career.

n8 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

In August, Garrison found that Todd's suit had been post-
poned and Lundy had given up hope of reviving the Genius,
a decision which concerned him less now that he had his own
paper to consider. While awaiting release from jail he had
written three lengthy exposes of colonization, and these he
now decided to deliver on a lecture tour throughout the
Northeast to raise funds for the Liberator. After failing to
find a hall in Baltimore he said good-by to Lundy and started
for Philadelphia and a meeting with a second group of
abolitionists who would soon form an outpost of "Garrison-
ism" in the City of Brotherly Love.

In 1830 the anti-slavery center of the Philadelphia Friends
was the home of James and Lucretia Mott in South Fourth
Street. Lucretia was a heavy-featured woman with a gentle
mouth and deep-set gray eyes that masked her enormous
energy and strong will At school in Poughkeepsie she had
met James Mott, a tall, shy, excessively grave young man who
taught the boys' classes; and in 1811, when she was nineteen
and he twenty-three, they married and settled in Philadelphia,
where Mott entered a cotton commission house. Their first
experience with slavery came in 1815, when a South Carolina
planter willed his slaves to the Philadelphia Meeting to be
manumitted, a request which James recognized as involving
"considerations of no small magnitude to civil society." Three
years later Lucretia accompanied the Quaker preacher Sarah
Zane on a tour of Virginia, where the sight of slave coffles
shuffling through Harpers Ferry affected her much as a
similar view had startled Benjamin Lundy. Prodded by her
conscience, she began to examine the free produce movement
and soon concluded that it was her duty to boycott all prod-
ucts made by slave labor. Henceforth the groceries in the
Mott household came from Lydia White's Requited Labor
Grocery and Dry-Goods Store, although James continued to

LAUNCHING THE LIBERATOR 119

accept commissions for slave cotton. Their family ate only
free rice and free sugar and wore clothes made from free
cotton. Even their candies were afree sweets" stamped with
anti-slavery couplets:

If slavery comes by color, which God gave,
Fashion may change, and you become the slave.

After struggling with his conscience for five years James
abandoned the cotton for the wool business, a decision, Lucre-
tia admitted, that made them "happy in the final freedom"
though "quite unsettled with regard to the future."

In 1828, just as Lucretia was beginning to take a more
active part in Quaker affairs, Elias Hicks split the Society of
Friends in America into two warring factions. As a Quietist,
Hicks objected to the growing worldliness of the Quakers
and their eagerness to cooperate with other churches in
promoting Bible and missionary societies. Especially did he
disapprove of the increased institutionalizing of Quakerism,
the excessive use of Quaker forms of speech and behavior, the
arbitrary power of the elders, and the infiltration of "evan- .
gelical" beliefs in the Bible as the word of God. Not all the
books ever written, he told his followers, could communicate
God to His children, who needed only the guidance of the
Inner Light.7

The Motts joined the Hicksites because they too disliked
"oppressive authority" and sought a practical Christianity.
Lucretia particularly deprecated controversy over creedal
differences and held that the "gloomy dogmas of the schools"
mattered less than the heavenly light within. "Men are to be
judged by their likeness to Christ rather than by their notions
of Christ," she announced in one of her sermons not long
before she met Garrison, She was even more critical of
dictatorial practices among the elders that kept men and

120 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

women from thinking for themselves. "The veneration of
believers," she complained, "has been strengthened by their
not being allowed to think."8 She worried lest the fear of being
called an infidel keep too many Friends from striking out on
their own in reforming the world. "I care not for charges of
verbal infidelity; the infidelity I should dread, is to be faith-
less to the right, to moral principle, to the divine impulses of
the soul, to a confidence in the possible realization of the
millennium now." The millennium now — here was the key
to the Motts' faith and the goal of their practical Christianity.

At first the Motts' religious liberalism shocked Garrison,
who still prided himself on his orthodoxy. Gradually, how-
ever, as their friendship deepened, he was won over by their
tolerance and simplicity. Looking back at their first meeting
from the height of his career, he admitted that their friendship
had been a decisive influence in his life. "Though I was
strongly sectarian in my religious sentiments (Calvinist) at
that time, and hence uncharitable in judgment touching theo-
logical differences of opinion . . . yet they manifested a most
kind, tolerant, catholic spirit, and allowed none of these
considerations to deter them from giving me their cordial
approbation and cheering countenance as an advocate of the
slave. If my mind has since become liberalized in any degree,
(and I think it has burst every sectarian trammel,) — if theo-
logical dogmas which I once regarded as essential to Christian-
ity, I now repudiate as absurd and pernicious — I am largely
indebted to them for the change."*

A lecture hall and an audience willing to hear a tirade
against colonization proved hard to find in Philadelphia in
1830. After importuning nearly every church leader ia the
city, Garrison was about to leave for New York in despair
when he was finally given the Franklin Institute for three
successive nights beginning on August 31. The small audience

LAUNCHING THE LIBERATOR 121

composed of the Motts and their Quaker circle of Shipleys,
Pughs, and Davises and a handful of free colored people
listened attentively if not with entire approval to his im-
peachment of the Colonization Society. Even Lucretia thought
his speech somewhat severe, although she could not help
agreeing that his principles were correct. She and her husband
invited him to their home, where spirited and earnest con-
versation soon thawed the young lecturer's reserve. They
talked of Lundy and his work, and Lucretia inquired about his
own plans, the state of anti-slavery opinion in New England,
and his hopes for the Liberator. He left Philadelphia in
buoyant spirits, assured of the interest of many of the Quakers
there and anxious now to test the doctrine of immediate eman-
cipation in Boston.

Garrison's doctrine of immediate emancipation was an im-
port from England. In May, 1830, while he still sat in his
Baltimore cell planning his strategy, across the Atlantic, in
London, there occurred an event that marked the turning
point in the history of anti-slavery. On May 15 English
abolitionists, members of the Anti-Slavery Society, met in
Exeter Hall for their annual convention. With the diminutive
William Wilberforce, now at seventy-one ill and shrunken,
presiding on a platform filled with elder statesmen in the
cause, his proteg6 Thomas Fowell Buxton rose ponderously to
offer a resolution calling for the abolition of slavery through-
out the Empire "at the earliest possible period." Buxton's
carefully worded resolution was backed by the authority of
the veterans Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay, Thomas Clark-
son and James Stephen, men who knew the wisdom of
moderation and had practiced it for forty years in their cam-
paign against the West Indian planters. By 1830, however,
the leadership of the abolitionist party outside Parliament had
fallen into the hands of younger men with less patience and

122 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

more militancy. Before the May meeting they had agreed to
demand immediate emancipation as the sole remedy for
slavery. To the consternation of the Old Guard they amended
Buxton's resolution to provide for immediate action and the
formation of an Agency Committee to convert all England.

Following up their unexpected success, the advocates of
immediate emancipation decided to go straight to the country
without waiting for elections to provide them with a more
tractable ministry. The success of their agents was astound-
ing: in twelve months' time the number of anti-slavery
societies rocketed from two hundred to thirteen hundred, and
petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures flooded
Westminster. Their new techniques — the lecture, pamphlet,
handbill and poster — gave English abolition a momentum
which it never lost. In 1832 Parliament passed the long-over-
due Reform Bill, and in April of the next year, when three
hundred delegates marched in a body to present an address to
the Prime Minister, the government realized that thanks to the
Agency Committee the delegates spoke the demands of the
majority of Englishmen. Before such strength it could only
bow by passing the West India Emancipation Act on August
29, 1833.

Garrison was impressed with the English indictment of
the West Indian planters and with the emphasis on slavery as a
sin. If Clarkson and Wilberforce, the wisest and best men of
their age, agreed on immediate emancipation as the only hope,
then Americans had best accept it as the terms of divine
justice.

In his belief that the British anti-slavery model was ex-
portable Garrison was wrong on two counts. In the first place,
the power of Parliament to legislate for the colonies far sur-
passed congressional authority over the states. The English
abolitionists demanded that Parliament put a definite terminus

LAUNCHING THE LIBERATOR 123

to slavery by legislative fiat — this was all that "immediate
emancipation" really meant. Nothing like a general law
abolishing slavery in the South could be expected from Con-
gress. Little as he knew of constitutional law, Garrison ad-
mitted that Congress had no power to regulate slavery in the
states, and this hard fact should have prevented him from
making any such easy assumptions as his British friends might
afford.

The second factor which Garrison overlooked in his haste
to copy British methods was the obvious prestige of the anti-
slavery movement in England. When it was formed in 1823
the Anti-Slavery Society boasted a royal duke for its presi-
dent, five peers and fourteen members of Parliament for vice-
presidents. Where were the likes of these to be found in
America?

Yet for all his ignorance of the actual machinery of British
anti-slavery, Garrison rightly sensed an affinity stemming
from the religious dedication common to Englishmen and
Americans. The soul of abolition in England was Evangelical-
ism, the religion of the Clapham Sect of "Saints," as they were
called because of their piety and high seriousness, their air of
self-condemnation and their accent on Christian conduct.
Evangelicalism in England, unlike the more diffuse religious
sentiment in America, was a movement, and the Clapham Sect
a distinct set of people who shared the same belief in the
power of the regenerated will to shape society to its own
image.

Evangelicalism was thus a practical religion, and the Clap-
hamites, like the Tappans and Motts, were practical people.
The Saints, whose solid town houses ringed Clapham Com-
mon, were men of the world who enjoyed the amenities of life
and knew the value of money as a power for good. Theirs
was no closed sainthood — they practiced no initiatory rites,

124 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

professed no rigid code. Unable to ignore worldly opinion,
they were nonetheless happiest in their own community of
shared values, admonishing one another in plain language and
organizing projects for improving society, chief among them
the abolition of slavery. Theirs were feelings which Garrison
could understand, a sense of consecration overriding all
doubts, a moral rather than mystical faith in divine purpose,
the kind of assurance that had sustained his mother through
the dark days of her marriage and driven him to take up the
cause of the slave. In the spirit of English Evangelicalism he
set out to organize American abolitionists and form a Clapham
Sect of his own.

On October 12, 1831, the Boston Courier printed this
notice:

WANTED. -For three evenings, a Hall or Meet-
inghouse (the latter would be preferred), in which
to vindicate the rights of TWO MILLION of
American citizens who are now groaning in servile
chains in the boasted land of liberty; and also to
propose just, benevolent, and constitutional mea-
sures for their relief. As the addresses will be gra-
tuitous and as the cause is of public benefit, I cannot
consent to remunerate any society for the use of its
building. If this application fails, I propose to ad-
dress the citizens of Boston in the open, on the
Common.

WM. LLOYD GARRISON
No. 30 Federal Street, Oct. 11, 1830

It was not a church or religious society that answered his
appeal but Abner Kneeland's group of freethinkers who of-
fered their rooms in Julien Hall. Accordingly on Friday
evening, October 15, he rose before a "small but select
audience" of "the virtuous and high minded portion of the

LAUNCHING THE LIBERATOR 125

community" (already favorite Garrisonian phrases) to deliver
what was perhaps the most important speech of his life. Ly-
man Beecher was there, all smiles and benevolence, and so was
John Tappan, the hardheaded brother of Arthur and Lewis.
Samuel Joseph May, the Unitarian minister who had at-
tended Lundy's meeting at Collier's two years earlier, brought
along his cousin Samuel Sewall and his brother-in-law Bron-
son Alcott.

Garrison began his talk by thanking Kneeland's "infidels"
for the use of their hall It was indicative of the depths to
which the New England conscience had descended that he
was forced to accept the charity of the very men whose
atheistic opinions he had censured in the pages of the National
Philanthropist. Abolition properly belonged to the churches,
and if they refused to act, they must be purified by true
Christians, Slaveowners were not and never could be Chris-
tians — "God, and the angels, and the devil, and the universe
know that they are without excuse." He charged coloniza-
tionists with playing a cruel joke on an unsuspecting public.
He himself had been their dupe until he discovered their dia-
bolical purpose, but now duty demanded that he denounce
their plot. Were statistics needed to prove the futility of
colonization, or quotations to confirm the cunning of its
leaders? If so, here they were in abundance. . . ,

His speech was a masterpiece of destructive argument.
When he finished May and Sewall knew that they had been
called to a holy war. After the lecture Beecher, Alcott, May
and Sewall approached the platform, and their reactions to
Garrison were as varied as their personalities. Beecher seemed
visibly disturbed. Once before he had been approached by
this brash young man who wanted to convert him to abolition,
and he had put him off by saying that he already had too
many irons in the fire. "Then you had better let all your irons

126 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

burn rather than neglect your duty to the slave," Garrison
had retorted. But this evening Beecher was upset by the ardor
with which Garrison argued his dangerous ideas. "Your zeal
is commendable," he told him, "but you are misguided." If he
would only forget his fanatical ideas, Beecher said, he could
make him the Wilberforce of America. But Garrison only
smiled his disagreement and turned to accept the congratula-
tions of May and Sewall. For some time now he had doubted
Beecher's conviction, and his remarks that evening only con-
firmed the great man's lack of moral fiber. An idol had fallen.

Far different were the responses of Sewall and May. The
two Samuels shared more than progressive Unitarian homes
and a Harvard education. They were kindred souls who cared
less for polity and forms of worship than for diffusing a non-
denominational faith based on the idea of moral self -improve-
ment. They were ready for abolition just as Garrison was
ready for the affection and good sense they offered. "That is
a providential man!" May remembered telling his cousin. He
told Garrison that though he could hardly endorse all of his
views, he was convinced that his was a divine calling. Alcott
invited them to his home, where they sat till long past mid-
night listening to the endless flow of Garrison's arguments.
"That night," May admitted, "my soul was baptised in his
spirit, and ever since I have been a disciple and fellow-laborer
of William Lloyd Garrison."10

Both May and Sewall remonstrated with Garrison for his
violent and abusive language. They disliked his journalistic
slang and his habit of calling slaveholders thieves and robbers
and accusing everyone who disagreed with him of willful
blindness. May tried to warn him of the dangers of excessive
heat: "Oh, my friend," he entreated, "do try to moderate
your indignation, and keep more cool! why, you are all on
fire!" "Brother May," Garrison snapped, "I have need to be

LAUNCHING THE LIBERATOR 12J

all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt."11
The cousins continued to hope that somehow they might
channel Garrison's godly energy. In this they were mistaken.

His decision to publish the Liberator in Boston did not
come immediately, but after audiences in New Haven, Hart-
ford and Newburyport spurned his lectures on colonization
he decided that there was a greater need for a revolution in
public opinion in the North — "and particularly in Neiv
England" — than in the South. Printing an unpopular news-
paper in a strange and hostile city was more than even he
could contemplate. Let Lundy attend to Washington. In
Boston he had a reputation that he could turn to good account
in getting credit and patronage. Isaac Knapp, who had come
north with him, agreed to a partnership, and Sewall and May
promised to find subscribers. Thus his seemingly bold resolve
to launch the paper "within the sight of Bunker Hill and the
birthplace of Liberty."12

He had difficulty naming his paper. Sewall thought the
Liberator altogether too provocative a title and suggested the
Safety Lamp, but Garrison would not agree. The actual
printing of the paper proved to be the worst of their troubles,
since they had neither a press nor the means to buy one. They
solved the problem temporarily by inducing their friend
Stephen Symonds Foster, the foreman of the Christian Ex-
aminer, to lend them his type in exchange for a day's work
at his press. The first three numbers of the Liberator were
printed with type hurriedly set in the middle of the night
and returned the next day. For his fourth number Garrison
succeeded in locating a lot of secondhand type and a small
hand press.

On Saturday morning, January i, 1831, four hundred
copies of the Liberator carried Garrison's declaration of
principles to the Boston public. His famous manifesto, squeezed

128 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

into four closely printed columns, sat askew on a front page
measuring exactly fourteen by nine and a quarter inches. "I
am aware that many object to the severity of my language,"
he wrote in a pointed allusion to the strictures of May and
Sewall, "but is there not cause for severity?"

/ will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On
this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with
moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give
a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from
the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate
her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me
not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest
— I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a
single inch — AND i WILL BE HEARD.

The words if not their spirit were new. He had said the
same thing before and would repeat it countless times again.
But he never succeeded in saying it as well.

7
Fanning the Flames

THE OFFICE OF the Liberator was located in Merchants
Hall, first in No. 6, and then after a few weeks in No. 10
under the eaves. It was a small dingy room with tiny, ink-
spattered windows. In one corner stood the press opposite the
battered composing desk; in the center of the room a long
roughhewn mailing table littered with copy ran from wall to
wall and next to it Garrison's bed for visitors to step around.
In this room the editor worked sixteen hours every day but
Sunday, setting type, running off copy, compiling mailing
lists, answering letters with painstaking deliberation, and as
midnight approached dashing off the editorials that soon made
him notorious. The partners lived chiefly on water and stale
bread from a nearby bakery. In February they took on a
colored apprentice to help with the manual work.

Visitors were welcome at No. 10 Merchants Hall, and
they began coming in increasing numbers, some out of sheer
curiosity, but more with real interest and the desire to help.
May and Sewall were frequent callers and so was Arnold
Buffum, the taciturn Quaker hatter from Rhode Island. Here
too came Ellis Gray Loring, the proper Bostonian lawyer;
David Lee Child, the liberal Unitarian editor who remembered
Garrison from the days of the National Philanthopist; and
Amos Phelps, the energetic Congregational minister, first an

130 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

admirer and then a bitter enemy of the Liberator. Oliver
Johnson, a devout young evangelical who used the Liberator
type to print his fly-by-night Christian Soldier, often wan-
dered in, drawn by Garrison's apostolic manner. To Johnson
the editor seemed a divinely inspired leader; and in the years
to come he served his master as chore-boy, loyal and unques-
tioning for thirty-five years, his carbon-copy mind reproduc-
ing faithfully the Garrisonian gospel.

Here in No. 10 his visitors would sit dispersed about the
crowded and stuffy room listening to Garrison, who sat tipped
back in his editorial chair, stroking a stray cat in his lap and
pausing in the midst of his endless monologue to wipe an ink-
stained hand across his balding head. He thrived on the interest
and admiration of these new friends with whom he talked
simply and candidly. The contrast between the incendiary
editor of their imagination and the mild, gentle-humored man
behind the desk disconcerted more than one of his visitors.
Instead of a dark-visaged desperado — "something like a pi-
rate"—they found a scholarly-looking gentleman. Nothing
pleased the twenty-six-year-old editor more than to be de-
scribed as a man of tender sensibilities and courtly manners.

So demanding was the manual work of printing the
Liberator that Garrison hardly found time for composition.
"My worthy partner and I complete the mechanical part,"
he explained to May in apologizing for some editorials he
regarded as slipshod, "that is to say, we compose and dis-
tribute, on every number, one hundred thousand types, besides
performing the presswork, mailing the papers to subscribers
&c., &C."1 The editorial fraternity may have received the
Liberator "with acclamation" as he joyfully reported to May,
but the public, which knew the paper chiefly through the
reputation of its editor, greeted it with apathy and then with
downright hostility.

FANNING THE FLAMES 131

In an age of mass communication it is difficult to under-
stand how the Liberator acquired the reputation it did. It
is a mistake to imagine smudged copies clandestinely passed
from hand to hand on the Charleston waterfront and in the
back streets of Richmond, or even widely read among North-
ern reformers. At the end of its first year, the Liberator had
gained only fifty white subscribers, and two years later they
numbered less than four hundred. Garrison enjoyed the dis-
tinction unique among editors throughout the country of ad-
dressing his message to white philanthropists and his appeals
for funds to the free Negroes. By his own admission the
Liberator belonged not to the whites — "they do not sustain
it" — but "emphatically to the people of color — it is their
organ."2 Its chief source of revenue in its first difficult year
was the pathetic contributions from the underprivileged
colored communities in Philadelphia, New York and Boston.
Garrison announced that his paper had acted on the free
Negroes "like a trumpet call." By the middle of February he
had ninety new subscriptions from Philadelphia and over
thirty from New York. "This then," he wrote to May, "is
my consolation: if I cannot do much, in this quarter, toward
abolishing slavery, I may be able to elevate our free colored
population in the scale of Society." But already rumblings
in the South indicated that the Liberator was destined for
a greater role than this.

The secret of Garrison's rapid ascent to notoriety lay in his
ingenious use of his list of exchanges, which numbered over
a hundred periodicals at the end of the first year. These he
manipulated skillfully to set off chain reactions of public
opinion. Southern editors received the Liberator, found it
highly offensive, and quoted it to show their readers the
lengths to which diabolical Yankees were prepared to go in
stripping the South of her birthright. Next, Northern editors,

THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

neutral or openly hostile to abolition but sensing good copy
here, reprinted the Southern editorials and added comments
of their own. Then both the original editorial and the com-
mentary appeared in the Liberator together with more Garri-
sonian invective, and the process began all over again. In
September, 1831, for example, Garrison proclaimed his undy-
ing friendship for Southern planters in these words: "I would
not, wittingly, harm a hair on their heads, nor injure them
in their lawful property. I am not their enemy, but their
friend. It is true, I abhor their oppressive acts; nor will I
cease to denounce them in terms of indignation. They will
surely be destroyed if they do not repent. MEN MUST BE
FREE/'3 When the volatile editor of the Tarboro', South
Carolina, Free Press read this, his righteous anger boiled over
and he replied with the charge that Garrison was employing
"secret agents" in the Palmetto State to incite a slave rebellion,
and suggested, further, that all such traitors apprehended by
loyal sons of the South should be roasted alive. Gales and
Seaton's National Intelligencer picked up the Tarboro' edi-
tor's rabble-rousing and printed it with an editorial warning
Garrison against "poisoning the waters of life" of the whole
American community. "We know nothing of the man," the
editors admitted, "we desire not to have him unlawfully dealt
with: we can even conceive of his motive being good in his
own opinion," but Bostonians who love the Union must inter-
vene to "vindicate the cause of humanity, as it is outraged by
the publication to which we refer." All of which appeared in
the Liberator a few weeks later as proof of "Southern mendac-
ity and folly." "My contempt of it is unutterable," Garrison
remarked. "Nothing but my own death, or want of patronage,
shall stop the Liberator"

Angry letters piled up on the mailing table. He answered
as many of them as he could, patiently explaining his terms

FANNING THE FLAMES

133

of opprobrium but refusing to alter his style. Publicly he
announced, "My language is exactly such as suits me; it will
displease many, I know — to displease them is my intention."
Further advice would be considered intrusive. "I do not want
it. I want more leisure from manual labor, in order to do
justice to the cause — I want a larger periodical that will
enable me and my correspondents to appear before the public
without crowding each other."4 Still the letters filled with

fear and contempt kept coming. "You d d scoundrel. Hell

is gaping for you! the devil is feasting in anticipation." A
Washington slaveholder wrote, "Your paper cannot much
longer be tolerated. . . . Shame on the Freemen of Boston
for permitting such a vehicle of outrage and rebellion to spring
into existence among them."5 Such complaints simply added
fuel to the fire of Garrison's incendiary glee. "Foes are on
my right hand and on my left," ran one self-congratulatory
editorial "The tongue of detraction is busy against me. I have
no communion with the world — the world none with me."6
Privately he confided to Henry Benson, a new agent for the
Liberator in Providence and his future brother-in-law, that
he was vastly pleased that "the disturbances at the South still
continue. The slaveholders are evidently given over to de-
struction. They are determined to shut out the light — to
hear none of the appeals of justice and humanity. I shudder
when I contemplate their fate."7

Critics of the Liberator accused it of inciting violence. It
was one thing, they declared, to protest pacific intentions, but
what were readers to make of verses like the following that
appeared immediately beside the editor's disavowal of force?

Though distant to be the hour, yet come it must —
Oh! hasten it, in mercy, righteous Heaven!

When Afric's sons, uprising from the dust,
Shall stand erect — their galling fetters riven . . .

134 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Wo if it come with storm, and blood and fire,
When midnight darkness veils the earth and sky!

Wo to the innocent babe — the guilty sire —
Stranger and Citizen alike shall die!

Red-handed Slaughter his revenge shall feed,
And Havoc yell his ominous death-cry,

And wild Despair in vain for mercy plead —

While Hell itself shall shrink, and sicken at the deed!8

Suddenly, in August, 1831, came Nat Turner's Rebellion in
Southampton County, Virginia, as if to give the lie to Garri-
son's irenic declarations. A month later the Liberator was on
trial for its life.

On August 21, 1831, a band of slaves variously estimated
between fifty and seventy in number marched through South-
ampton County killing and looting. Their leader was Nat
Turner, a thirty-one-year-old fanatic who believed himself
divinely commissioned to free his fellow slaves and who had
been plotting this uprising with the help of heavenly voices
for some time. When the sign came he fell into a trance but
recovered in time to begin butchering every white man in
Virginia. His army of the Lord was easily routed, though not
before he and his followers had killed sixty-one whites. Tur-
ner was hanged along with all of his confederates, and an
aftermath of reprisals began in which over a hundred Negroes
were killed, many of them after inhuman torture.

In the midst of this six-month reign of terror many South-
erners were forcibly reminded of another black prophet,
David Walker, whose Appeal calling on the slaves to revolt
had been published in Boston less than two years before.
David Walker was a free Negro of almost legendary fame and
one of the first heroes of the anti-slavery movement The son
of a slave father and a free mother in Wilmington, North
Carolina, he had wandered all over the South for years before

FANNING THE FLAMES 135

settling in Boston, where he opened a secondhand clothes
shop. In September, 1829, just as Lundy and Garrison were
organizing their joint enterprise, Walker published his pam-
phlet, Appeal in Four Articles Together with a Preamble to
the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and
Very Expressly, to those of the United States of America,
an extraordinary piece of malevolence based on a belief in the
superiority of the black race. In the course of his travels
Walker had acquired a rudimentary education that somehow
accounted for his crude cyclical philosophy of history in
which God regularly intervened on the side of downtrodden
races. In his role of prophet he foresaw a war of extermination
that would kill off the whites "like rattlesnakes." "Let twelve
good black men get armed for battle and they will kill and put
to flight fifty whites. Get the blacks started, and if you don't
have a gang of tigers and lions to deal with, then I am a
deceiver of the blacks and of the whites. If you commence
make sure work of it: don't trifle, for they will not trifle with
you. KiH or be killed."9

Walker's Appeal went through three editions in six months,
each more bloodthirsty than the last. Just before his death
in 1830 under mysterious circumstances, he visited Richmond,
Virginia, where he circulated thirty copies of his pamphlet,
only twenty of which were recovered when he was arrested.
Thus, when the black prophet Nat Turner attacked his white
masters a year later, it seemed to many a Virginian that the
blood bath was the result of Walker's devilish Appeal

Garrison emphatically condemned both the Appeal and
Turner's hair-raising conspiracy. Yet his attitude toward vio-
lence, indeed, his allegiance to the peace cause remained
curiously ambiguous. Reviewing the Appeal for readers of
the Genius, he had criticized it as "a most injudicious publi-
cation" while admitting that its incitement to violence was

136 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

" warranted by the creed of an independent people." Although
he "deprecated its circulation," he was forced to admire its
"impassioned and determined spirit" and "the bravery and
intelligence" of its author.10 When Southern editors clamored
for his punishment as an apologist for the Southampton revolt,
Garrison was correct in replying that he had never preached
anything to the slaves but submission. Yet his disavowal of
violence was something less than unequivocal. A month after
the revolt, he wrote, "Ljlojiotjj^

bellioniji^ similar

<5onduct in white men. I deny the right of any people to fight
foFli^ a Quaker in principles. Of all men

living, however, our slaves have the best reason to assert their
rights by violent measures, inasmuch as they are more op-
pressed than others. "^•^hirty years later he would soon dis-
pose of the incident at Harpers Ferry in nearly identical
terms. Then it appeared to many Southerners, just as it did
to the Virginia legislature in the aftermath of Nat Turner's
revolt, that the editor of the Liberator was not the man of
peace he pretended to be. They saw only a misguided fanatic
who called slaveowners "beasts" and "criminals" and de-
nounced their measures as "atrocities." They proposed to
deal with him accordingly.

In October the city of Georgetown in the District of
Columbia passed an ordinance prohibiting free Negroes from
receiving the Liberator. Then a vigilance committee in Colum-
bia, South Carolina, offered a reward for the apprehension
of any person caught circulating Garrison's paper or Walker's
Appeal Town meetings in Bethesda, Maryland, and Savannah,
Georgia, voted similar measures. The Grand Jury of Raleigh,
North Carolina, found a true bill against Garrison and Knapp
for distributing their paper in the county contrary to the
kws of the state. In December, Governor James Hamilton of

/ANNING THE FLAMES

South Carolina forwarded to the legislature a special mes-
sage together with copies of the Liberator and Garrison's
speech to the Free People of Color delivered the previous
June in Philadelphia. In his message Hamilton referred to a
letter from the governor of Virginia which he said "leaves no
doubt that the spirit of insubordination in that State was
excited by the incendiary newspapers and other publications,
put forth in the non»slaveholding States, and freely circulated
within the limits of Virginia." At Hamilton's suggestion, South
Carolina's Senator Robert Y. Hayne wrote a letter of protest
to his old colleague Harrison Gray Otis, now mayor of
Boston, asking what measures might be taken to suppress the
Liberator immediately. Only after making several inquiries
could Otis unearth enough information to allay his suspicions.
"I am told," he reported to Hayne, "that it is supported
chiefly by the free colored people; that the number of sub-
scribers in Baltimore and Washington exceeds that of those in
this city, and that it is gratuitously left at one or two of the
reading rooms in this place." As far as he could ascertain, Otis
said, the editor was a disgruntled ne'er-do-well who had lived
for a while in Baltimore, "where his feelings have been
exasperated by some occurrences consequent to his publica-
tions there." Atrocious and detestable as his sentiments were,
his newspaper had yet to stir even a teapot tempest and was
not likely to win converts among the more respectable classes
of Boston. It would be hasty and imprudent, Otis concluded,
to take any immediate action.12

Nevertheless, he dispatched police officers to No. 10 Mer-
chants Hall to establish the truth of Hayne's complaint that
Garrison regularly supplied him with the Liberator. The visit
proved to be just what the editor wanted — a chance to
defend the freedom of the press.

I5g THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

The Hon. Robert Y. Hayne, of Columbia, S.C. (through the
medium of a letter), wishes to know of the Mayor of Boston
who sent a number of the Liberator to him, a few weeks ago?
The Mayor of Boston (through the medium of a deputy) wishes
to know of Mr. Garrison whether he sent the aforesaid number
to the aforesaid individual? Mr. Garrison (through the medium
of his paper) wishes to know of the Hon. Robert Y. Haync, of
Columbia, S.C., and the Mayor of Boston, what authority they
have to put such questions?13

He never received an answer.

In November came the strongest protest yet against the
Liberator ~~ &n open invitation to kidnapping. The upper
house of the Georgia legislature passed a resolution providing
"that the sum of five thousand dollars be, and the same is
hereby appropriated to be paid to any person or persons who
shall arrest, bring to trial and prosecute to conviction, under
the laws of this State the editor or publisher of a certain paper
called the Liberator"1* Secretly pleased with the welcome
publicity, Garrison professed himself shocked at this "mon-
strous proposition." *"

Where is the liberty of the press and of speech? where the spirit
of our fathers? where the immunities secured to us by our Bill
of Rights? Is it treason to maintain the principles of the Declara-
tion of Independence? Must we say that slavery is a sacred and
benevolent institution, or be silent? - Know this, ye Senatorial
Patrons of kidnappers! . . . The Liberator shall yet live - live to
warn you of your danger and guilt — live to plead for the perish-
ing slave — live to hail the day of universal emancipation,15

To Henry Benson he wrote of the "perilous times" ahead
for the Liberator and the Negroes. "So infuriated are the
whites against them since the Virginia and North Carolina in-
surrection that the most trifling causes may lead to a war of
extermination."16

FANNING THE FLAMfeS 139

These prophecies seemed premature and even ludicrous in
1831. Not for another five years would Southern statesmen in
league with Northern business interests mount a full-scale
counterattack on abolition. If his bid for recognition as the
leader of American anti-slavery led Garrison intentionally to
overestimate the dangers to the Liberator, his analysis of the
issues nevertheless proved correct. The events of the next
decade would show that the defenders of slavery were bent
on destroying abolition even if it meant the annihilation of
American civil liberties. By standing on their constitutional
rights, Garrison, James G. Birney, Theodore Weld, Elijah
Lovejoy and the other "martyrs" of the anti-slavery move-
ment had largely won this fight by 1 840. In attaching to their
cause the rights of free speech, free press, and free assembly
they won over to their side new recruits who were less con-
cerned with slavery as a. sin than with the loss of basic free-
doms, and who gradually came to see in the struggle between
the anti-slavery and the slavery forces the choice between an
open society with its free intellectual market and a closed
community afraid of ideas. Then, as in its first year, the
Liberator upheld its editor's belief that "the triumph of truth
is as sure as the light of heaven."

Not Southern opposition alone but a lack of patronage
threatened the life of the Liberator in its first year. Garrison
organized groups of free Negroes in Boston and lectured in
Providence, New York and Philadelphia to raise money for
his paper; but he knew that it could not survive indefinitely on
these slender contributions. Desperately he called for "a con-
centration of moral strength" in Boston, an anti-slavery
society to save the Liberator™ His call was soon heeded.

On Sunday afternoon, November 13, 1831, fifteen men met
in the offices of Samuel Sewall in State Street to hear Garrison
expound on the need for a New England anti-slavery society.

H0 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

He had announced in advance that if the apostolic number of
twelve could be found in agreement on principles, they would
form a society forthwith. Now he spoke long and earnestly
on the merits of the British anti-slavery model and the virtues
of immediate emancipation. When it came time to vote, how-
ever, only nine of the group could bring themselves to agree
with the editor; six others, including Sewall, Loring and
Child, feared the repercussions in Boston society of such
radical doctrine. The meeting ended without any action on
Garrison's project.

A month later he tried again, this time with only nine
disciples — Sewall, Loring, Child, Knapp, Johnson, and four
others. A committee headed by Garrison was appointed to
draft a constitution which was to be reported at the first
general meeting of the new society on January i, 1832. The
Liberator gave an account of these proceedings and issued
an immediate call for membership. At the meeting on the
first day of the new year Garrison's constitution was adopted
with only a few minor alterations. New recruits appeared
at this meeting, among them Dr. Gamaliel Bradford, soon to
be made superintendent of the Massachusetts General Hos-
pital, and the Reverend Abijah Blanchard, an anti-Masonic
editor of local fame. The question of a preamble to the consti-
tution was postponed for a second meeting a week later at
the African Baptist Church in Belknap Street in the heart of
Boston's "Nigger Hill." The preamble bore the Garrisonian
stamp and provoked strong disagreement. After prolonged
debate in which Sewall, Loring and Child objected strenu-
ously to the language of the preamble and the principles of
the majority, the constitution was signed by Garrison and
eleven others, none of whom, it was observed, could have put
a hundred dollars into the treasury without bankrupting
themselves. The opposition of his three friends did not pre-

FANNING THE FLAMES 141

vent Garrison from indulging in the histrionics he so enjoyed.
"We have met tonight in this obscure school-house," he told
the gathering, "our members are few and our influence
limited; but, mark my prediction, Faneuil Hall shall ere long
echo with the principles we have set forth. We shall shake
the Nation by their mighty power."18

The New England Anti-Slavery Society elected as its first
president Arnold Buff um, the Quaker hatter from Providence.
Garrison was appointed corresponding secretary, an arrange-
ment that satisfied both Garrison, who wanted to be free to
edit his paper, and the members, who feared that his radical
ideas might prejudice their organization in the eyes of New
Englanders. Buffum supplied the driving force of the society
in its first year. The son of a farmer in Smithfield, Rhode Is-
land, he was a self-educated man, an amateur inventor and
educational reformer as well as a stanch abolitionist. Not
long before the formation of the society he had returned from
England, where he discussed slavery with Clarkson and
educational theory with leading Quakers whose system of
"infant schools" he was anxious to try out in this country.
Garrison's call found him already active in Quaker circles
preaching emancipation and Elias Hicks's free-produce ideas.
Buffum and the faithful Oliver Johnson immediately took to
the field as agents of the society, traveling throughout south-
ern New England, organizing local societies, challenging
colonizationists, and defending Garrison and the Liberator
from charges of fanaticism. Meetings of the society were held
on the last Monday of each month, and standing committees
were appointed to prepare petitions, improve conditions in
Negro schools, and repeal the Massachusetts law preventing
intermarriage of blacks and whites. The Liberator was de-
clared the official organ of the society, a policy terminated to
the satisfaction of all parties by the publication, of a new

H2 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

paper, the Abolitionist, at the end of the year. "Our little
society is gradually expanding, and begins already to make a
perceptible impression upon the public mind," Garrison wrote
his friend Ebenezer Dole in June, 1832. "Scarcely has the
good seed been buried in the earth, and yet even now it is
sending up shoots in every direction."19

The "good seed" of New England abolitionism was its
founder's belief that emancipation could be accomplished only
by the moral rebirth of every American citizen. As the New
England Anti-Slavery Society grew, it sprouted branches of
"Garrisonism" in every direction. It was marked with many
of the virtues and all of the deficiencies of its leader's per-
sonality. In the first place, Garrison was not an organizer.
Much as he admired the efficiency of the English abolitionists,
he distrusted political maneuvering, particularly in large or-
ganizations where power might be ranged against him. He was
not above the tricks of manipulating blocs of votes himself,
but he preferred open debate and the rough-and-tumble ex-
change of opinions. He believed that right decisions re-
sulted from the deliberation of enlightened individuals who
instinctively arrived at a simple solution and proceeded to
carry It out. He was further convinced that emancipation
would become a reality only when a majority of Americans
had been converted in free and open discussion. Thus he
saw his society simply as a forum for individuals to bear
their testimony against slavery.

The New England Society grew into just this kind of
organization. Visitors at its annual meetings who were ac-
customed to the orderly business procedure of more central-
ized societies were shocked by the lack of system, the chaotic
financial condition, and the general absence of direction in
Garrison's society. They entirely mistook the dispositions and
intentions of the delegates for whom the annual trek to Bos-

FANNING THE FLAMES 143

ton was in the nature of a pilgrimage rather than a business
meeting, and from which they returned refreshed with liter-
ally hundreds of hours of talk. Eloquence was a penny a
bushel at these meetings, it is true, but eloquence was what
the members required. Along with Garrison they believed
that "moral suasion" meant collecting one, two, or a half-
dozen people and peppering them with arguments for im-
mediate emancipation. Although the society printed and dis-
tributed pamphlets and tracts, it was far less effective than the
New York and the Western societies at this type of propa-
ganda. Its forte was the spoken word — it furnished the best
of the anti-slavery orators and evangelists. Evangelism thrives
on community spirit, and this the annual conclave of the
New England abolitionists provided in abundance: two-hour
speeches, endless motions, resolutions, amendments, and mara-
thon personal testimonies of delegates each trying to outdo
the others in depicting the horrors of slavery and the de-
pravity of the planters. If it did nothing more, the annual
meeting of the society furnished a release for pent-up emo-
tions and sent members back to their homes prepared to dis-
rupt church services, badger their neighbors, and wander the
countryside in search of a martyrdom which was the aim of
the society and its founder.

While the new agents of the society opened their lecture
tour early in the spring of 1832, Garrison returned to his
paper and the unfinished campaign against colonization.
"Every Monday evening an animated discussion is held in
this city on the principles and tendencies of the American
Colonization Society,'1 he reported. "The friends of this
pernicious combination, having no ground on which to stand,
are routed in every debate."20 These discussion groups ceased
to satisfy him when he discovered that Boston's leading colo-
nizationists refused to be drawn into debates with him, but

144 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM IXOYD GARRISON

following the example of their New England agent, the
Reverend Joshua N. Danforth, went methodically about the
city infiltrating the churches. Their obvious disdain irked
Garrison. "Mr. Danforth and his coadjutors cannot be in-
duced to defend their cause. They affect to belong to the
'good society folks,' and therefore cannot stoop to the canaille.
Miserable pride! It is destined to have a mighty fall."21

For some time now he had been weighing Tappan's sugges-
tion that he write an anti-colonization tract. He sent for the
files of the African Repository, the organ of the Colonization
Society, and collected the reports of auxiliary societies,
speeches by leading colonizationists and dispatches from the
colony in Liberia. The longer he studied the society's meager
achievements, the more important it seemed to tear off its
mask of respectability. By April he had compiled an indict-
ment that answered, and a month later Thoughts on African
Colonization: or An Impartial Exhibition of the Doctrines,
Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society
was ready for the press. He was doubtful at first of his success
in discrediting the society and claimed only that his pamphlet
was "calculated to make a salutary impression."22 When no
effective rebuttal from the colonizationists appeared, however,
he dropped his modest pose and announced that it behooved
every lover of truth and friend of humanity to read it care-
fully. His boast contained a measure of truth, for despite its
severe limitations Thoughts stands as a major contribution to
the theory of racial democracy which, a century after Appo-
mattox, is still striving for recognition.

By the time he left Baltimore for Boston he had concluded
that the greatest obstacle to emancipation was the compla-
cency of Northerners who would not accept his principles*
Gradually the evil of slavery became identified in his mind
with the lack of Christian ideals. The real enemy, he now

FANNING THE FLAMES 145

saw, was not the slaveholder, culpable as he was, but the
great mass of indifferent people all over the country. Just as
the twentieth-century Communist discovers his chief enemy in
the middle-class liberal, so Garrison singled out as his victim
the well-meaning but morally uncommitted citizen who made
up the ranks of the American Colonization Society. Not con-
tent with presenting his case for immediate emancipation, he
was driven to destroy the society and incriminate its members.

The significance of his vendetta against colonization lay in
the new perspectives it furnished him. It was easy enough to
label his enemies "hard-hearted incorrigible sinners" and "piti-
ful, pale-faced usurpers," but what was his alternative to a
program he denounced as inadequate in design and injurious
in its operation? He needed to define his plan for freeing the
slave with a precision he had not yet shown. Since the found-
ing of the American Colonization Society in 1817 its most
effective critic had been the Northern free Negro. Garrison's
first contact with this body of opinion came in Baltimore,
where he met Lundy's friend William Watkins, whose trench-
ant criticism of colonization principles he published in the
Genius. Why, asked Watkins, should Negroes be forced to
leave their home for certain death in Africa? Why leave a
land of gospel light for one enshrouded in pagan gloom?
These questions set Garrison thinking,

At this time, too, Garrison first read Walker's Appeal, one
section of which was devoted to "Our Wretchedness in Con-
sequence of the Colonizing Plan.'7 Walker leveled his sights
on the false friends of the Negro who, he said, did not care
"a pinch of snuff" either for Africa or the slave. To them he
said simply, "We must and shall be free, I say, in spite of
you." Reading Walker's impassioned pages or listening to the
heated discussion of Watkins and Lundy's other colored
friends, Garrison wondered how the colonizationists had

146 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

duped Americans into believing the Negro unfit for civilized
life. That there were thousands of them huddled into slums
in Northern cities and living in crime and squalor he would
not deny. Yet once given education and proper Christian
training might not the whole race rise to the level of Watkins
and Walker or even — secretly he believed it possible — to that
of white Americans? Then he realized that the answer hinged
on the fate of the American Colonization Society.

In its first crucial year the Liberator pressed the attack on
colonization to the limits of sensationalism. An editorial for
April 23, 1831, announced the editor's decision to unmask
the society as a group of Negro-haters "who have entered
into this CONSPIRACY AGAINST HUMAN RIGHTS," Hard on the
heels of this accusation came others: the Colonization Society
was founded on "Persecution," "Falsehood," "Cowardice,"
and "Infidelity"; it conspired to strengthen slavery; it libeled
the Negro race; it betrayed the American heritage of free-
dom.23

In June, 1831, he was invited to address the Free People of
Color in Philadelphia, where he was the guest of Robert Pur-
vis, the son-in-law of Negro leader James Forten. Talking
with these colored families and visiting in their homes made
him realize how much emancipation meant to them. They
flattered him, sought his advice, and openly courted his ap-
proval. He, in his turn, lectured them endlessly, advising them
to make Jesus their exemplar and refuge, and counseling them
against hatred and violence. He clearly enjoyed playing their
father confessor, and there was a good deal of spurious hu-
mility in his posture. He could hardly meet these Negroes on
their own terms without betraying a habitual sense of superi-
ority, but he could learn to respect if not to understand them.
Even then he was driven to ritualize his initiation by a formal
act of contrition. "I never rise to address a colored audience,"

FANNING THE FLAMES 147

he told them, "without feeling ashamed of my own color;
ashamed at being identified with a race of men who have done
you so much injustice. . . . To make atonement, in part,
for this conduct, I have solemnly dedicated my health, and
strength, and life, to your service."24 Though he spoke of
love, forgiveness and compassion, what emerged most clearly
from this confession was his own overriding sense of guilt.

Back in Boston he prepared to dispose of colonization once
and for all. He had to prevent the society from poisoning the
minds of the people, for until Americans were willing to ad-
mit the Negro to an equality of rights there could be no
Christian society. "They do not wish to admit them to an
equality," he confessed to Henry Benson, "they tell us we
must always be hostile to the free people of color, while they
remain in this country. If this be so, then we had better burn
our bibles, and our Declaration of Independence and candidly
acknowledge ourselves to be incorrigible tyrants and hea-
thens."25 The only other course open to Christians lay in a
holy war of extermination of prejudice, and this course he
now determined to take.

Thoughts on African Colonization is a bulky pamphlet of
two hundred and forty pages which opens with the familiar
dispassionate announcement of the author's "unbiassed mind"
and "lively sense of accountability to God."26 So far, his re-
ward for disinterested benevolence had consisted solely of
persecution and abuse. "I have been thrust into prison, and
amerced in a heavy fine! Epithets, huge and unseemly, have
been showered upon me without mercy. . . . Assassinations
have been threatened me in a multitude of anonymous letters.
Private and public rewards to a very large amount . . . have
been offered to any person who shall abduct or destroy me."27
Of his supposed recusancy to the cause of colonization he says

148 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM IXOYP GARRISON

only that "whereas I was blind, now I see," and seeing, has
decided to tell all

The main section of the pamphlet containing the mass of
damaging quotations against colonization is divided into ten
headings, each of them compiled about a core of quotations
designed to establish the truth of the allegation. To support
his first claim that the society is pledged not to interfere with
slavery he cites the second article of its constitution defining
its purpose as "exclusively" colonization. To this he adds
Henry Clay's periodical disclaimers of any intention to meddle
with slave property. Then follow quotations from John Ran-
dolph, G. W. Custis, Francis Scott Key, quotations from a
dozen annual reports of the society, quotations from coloni-
zation tracts, from auxiliary societies, memorials, and ad-
dresses — quotations ad nauseam. "Out of thine own mouth
will I condemn thee," warns the frontispiece, and so it proves.

In his resolve to ruin the Colonization Society whatever
the cost, Garrison did not scruple to use dishonest methods.
His promise to discuss the society as a whole counted for
nothing. Individual opinions of its members he treated as offi-
cial declarations of policy; he held the society responsible for
aU the editorial views of the African Repository. But his most
serious editorial transgression was the sin of omission, his un-
fair practice of quoting out of context. From a speech of
Dr. E. B. Caldwell, one of the founders of the society, he took
the following excerpt:

The more you improve the condition of these people, the more
you cultivate their minds, the more miserable you make them in
their present state. You give them a higher relish for those privi-
leges which they can never attain, and turn what you intend for
a blessing into a curse. No, if they must remain in their present
situation, keep them in the lowest state of ignorance and degrada*

FANNING THE FLAMES 149

tion. The nearer you bring them to the condition of brutes, the
better chance do you give them of possessing their apathy.28

Actually Caldwell had gone on to add: "Surely Americans
ought to be the last people on earth to advocate such slavish
doctrines — to cry peace and contentment to those who are
deprived of the blessings of civil liberty." This qualification
Garrison found it convenient to ornit. There were other
examples of quotations similarly doctored with italics, sen-
tences truncated and meanings twisted. He distorted ideas
because at bottom he did not really respect them. Concerned
with the immediate impact of opinion and unable to follow
other people's thoughts to their logical ends, he felt no mis-
givings about appropriating only what he needed at the mo-
ment, whether it was a paraphrase of a Biblical quotation or a
fragment of reasoned argument. When colonizationists com-
plained of this willful misrepresentation, he retorted that
however much he altered the structure he had not changed the
meaning — the devil's altar-rail needed not his polishing. Such
specious arguments aside, it was true most of his quotations
required no accommodation. Even without these fraudulent
tactics the Colonization Society stood condemned.

The text of Thoughts shows every sign of having been
hastily compiled from earlier editorials and speeches in the
attempt to lend fervor to the exposition. Yet seldom does the
forced eloquence rise above the commonplace. It is rather in
its appeal to the spirit of religious orthodoxy that the tract
attains its object in disclosing the revolutionary power latent
in the evangelical formula. The argument rests on Garrison's
assumption that sin, far from being solitary, springs from
communal roots. Slavery is the sum of interlocking and mu-
tually sustaining sinful acts and can be wiped out only by
collective repentance. Just as the lone sinner is cured by re-

J5° THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

generation, so a whole people can purify themselves under the
convenant by refusing to sin any longer. Their reward is
God's approval evidenced in a flourishing and holy com-
munity. "I appeal to those who have been redeemed from the
bondage of sin by the precious blood of Christ, and with
whom I hope to unite in a better world in ascribing glory,
and honor, and praise to the Great Deliverer for ever. If I
can succeed in gaining their attention, I feel sure of con-
vincing their understandings and securing their support."29
Regeneration, then abolition — the evangelical prescription for
reform.

In closing their Bibles and ignoring God's command, he
continued, Americans had forgotten that God made of one
blood all nations to dwell on the face of the earth. For Garri-
son the words "one blood" expressed a biological fact as well
as a spiritual truth. He believed that in a single creation God
had made all races of men, who, however physically distinct,
partook in common of the atoning blood of Christ. Christi-
anity enjoined racial equality because God had placed his
mark of infinite worth on all men. Some might argue that
He had placed a special mark on the black man. "True: and
he has also put a mark upon every man, woman and child, in
the world; so that every one differs in appearance from an-
other." To suppose therefore that races ought to be divided
into self-enclosed communities each with its own exclusive cul-
ture was to misread the divine plan.

The difference between a black and a white skin is not greater
than that between a white and a black one. In either case, the
mark is distinctive; and the blacks may as reasonably expel the
whites as the whites the blacks. To make such a separation we
have no authority; to attempt it, would only end in disappoint-
ment; and, if it were carried into effect, those who are clamour-
ous for the measure would be among the first cast out.80

FANNING THE FLAMES 151

The American Colonization Society, he went on, solemnly
assured the people that Nature had played them falsely.
Colored persons were born by mistake in this country; they
should have been born in Africa. "There occur at least sixty
thousand mistakes annually; while the Society has corrected
only about two thousand in fourteen years! But — courage!
men engaged in a laudable enterprise should never despair!"51
What about the thousands of mulattoes, quadroons, octo-
roons? Was it really possible to define the precise shade of
color which qualified a man for civilized life? If not, then
Americans had better raise an army of whites to drive out
everyone who could not produce vouchers that pure "English
blood" flowed in their veins. He refused to grant that color
was anything more than an incidental physiological difference
like bone structure having no connection with a man's mental
and moral proclivities. To be a thoroughgoing colonizationist
one would have to be consistent. "I must be able to give a
reason why all our tall citizens should not conspire to remove
their more diminutive brethren, and all the corpulent to re-
move the lean and the lank, and all the strong remove the
weak. ... I cannot perceive that I am more excusable in
desiring the banishment of my neighbor because his skin is
darker than mine, than I should be in desiring his banishment
because he is smaller or feebler than myself."

Nor were there any "impassable" natural barriers prevent-
ing racial intermarriage. Colonizationists argued that Nature
forbade the lion to beget the lamb or the leopard the bear, but
the "amalgamation" they so dreaded increased daily. The
Southern planters had clearly shown that amalgamation was
not only possible but eminently productive! Talk about the
"barriers of Nature" when die land swarmed with living refu-
tations of the statement Miscegenation laws constituted a
denial of our common humanity and a reproach to God. No

£52 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

man should be refused a share in the plenitude of creation
which "presents to the eye every conceivable shape, and
aspect, and color, in the gorgeous and multifarious productions
of Nature." Like everything else in the universe the free mix-
ture of races formed part of the divine plan.

Perhaps the gravest charge brought against the abolitionists
is that of attempting to "white-wash" the Negro by making
him like themselves. It is true that in his devotion to humanity
Garrison forgot the Negroes as individual human beings, and
that he wanted above all else to bring them to a state of grace.
He believed that the nearer they approached the whites in
their habits the better they were. He was continually search-
ing for the signs of gentility and refinement which would
prove them the equal of the whites, and when he thought he
discerned such traits he rejoiced. "I wish you had been with
me in Philadelphia," he wrote to Ebenezer Dole of his visit
there in 1832, "to see what I saw, to hear what I heard, and
to experience what I felt, in associating with many colored
families. There are colored men and women, in that city, who
have few superiors in refinement, in moral worth, and in all
that makes the human character worthy of admiration and
praise."32 It is also true that his relationship with Negroes was
always tempered by a sense of estrangement. For them he
symbolized the humanitarianism of the white people, righteous
but cold and impersonal, while in his eyes they appeared first
and last as noble examples of an oppressed race. He admired
but never really knew them or understood what it meant to be
a Negro. They always seemed to him a social problem rather
than simply people.

Still, if he thought only of "elevating" the race with the
prayers and promises of a white man's religion, such was his
prescription for all mankind. And if he continued to empha-
size unduly the ability of the Negro to become like the white

FANNING THE FLAMES Z53

it was because few of his contemporaries were prepared to
believe this was possible. The time when science would ex-
plode the myth of inherited racial characteristics lay far in
the future. In 1832 Americans accepted the "depravity" and
"corruption" of the colored people as established fact. What
better way to prove equality, Garrison asked himself, than
by making the Negro white? For the failure of perception
and the habit of evading all genuine experience of the race
his critics were right in condemning him. He never tried to
understand people, black or white, but preferred to use them
as counters in the grim business of reform. But at a time when
it was generally agreed that the Negro race was inherently
inferior Garrison's detachment — his ability to isolate people
from the environmental forces that produce them — was an
asset rather than a liability.

From the premise of Christian universalism Thoughts pro-
ceeded to a distinction between gradual and immediate eman-
cipation. What was gradual emancipation — a gradual ab-
staining from cruelty and oppression? "Do colonizationists
mean, that slave-dealers shall purchase or sell a few victims
less this year than they did last? that slave-owners shall liberate
one, two, or three out of every hundred slaves during the
same period? that slave-drivers shall apply the lash to the
scarred and bleeding backs of their victims somewhat less
frequently?" Immediate e?nancipation, on the other hand,
meant "simply declaring that slave-owners are bound to ful-
fill — now, without any reluctance or delay — the golden rule,
namely, to do as they would be done by."38 It did not mean
that all slaves should immediately be given the right to vote or
hold office or even be free from "the benevolent restraints of
guardianship." Immediate emancipationists demanded only
that the Negro be given the right to work as a free laborer
along with education and religious instruction. Freedom

154 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

would increase the value of Negro labor and augment the
wealth of the South. The new freedmen would make good
citizens: "they will not be idle, but avariciously industrious;
they will not rush through the country firing dwellings and
murdering inhabitants; for freedom is all they ask,"34

The publication of Thoughts plunged the Liberator into
temporary financial trouble, and soon Garrison was com-
plaining that he must let the paper "die" or make public his
embarrassment;35 Happily, the tract began to sell Arthur
Tappan ordered one hundred copies for distribution among
his friends. Copies found their way into the libraries at Lane
Seminary and Western Reserve. Theodore Weld, a convert to
abolition and a rising figure in Western anti-slavery circles,
discussed Garrison's arguments with his followers. Within
nine months it had sold 2750 copies — by anti-slavery stand-
ards an unprecedented number. Garrison was naturally
pleased with his success and announced as early as June that
"conversions from colonization are rapidly multiplying in
every quarter."36 The Colonization Society, after expressing
the charitable hope that Garrison would modify his views,
chose to ignore the work. Agents of the society made a few
feeble attempts to defend colonization in open debate with the
Garrisonians, only to be routed. Skirmishes between the two
camps continued for a decade, but for all practical purposes
the appearance of Thoughts ended the usefulness of the so-
ciety. "The roads of Colonization and Abolition lead in dif-
ferent directions, but they do not cross each other," Henry
Clay once said. In 1832, standing at the crossroads of reform,
Northern opponents of slavery read Garrison's signpost and
chose the road that led to emancipation.

8
Triumph and Doubt in 1833

IN APRIL, 1833, Garrison sailed for England on his first
anti-slavery mission. In New York on the eve of his de-
parture he discovered a "murderous design77 to kidnap and
deliver him to the authorities in Georgia, and he rushed off to
Philadelphia to board the Liverpool packet before the con-
spirators realized their mistake. But he was too late — the ship
had sailed and there was nothing to do but return secretly to
New York and baffle the vigilance of his enemies by hiding
aboard the pilot boat until it was far down the harbor. "My
friends are full of apprehension and disquietude," he wrote
to one of his female admirers, "but I cannot know fear. I feel
that it is impossible for danger to awe me. I tremble at noth-
ing but my own delinquencies, as one who is bound to be
perfect even as my heavenly Father is perfect."1

As usual he had refurbished the facts to suit his purpose.
His pursuers were not young bloods from Georgia intent on
carrying him off, but the sheriff of Windham County, Con-
necticut, who had tried to serve him with five separate writs
for his part in helping Prudence Crandall, the Quaker school-
mistress, establish a school for colored girls. The unhappy
sheriff had caught sight of Garrison a few minutes after he
left by stage for New York and had chased the coach for
a few miles before giving up in disgust. Garrison was sure

i5<5 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

that the escapade was part of a plot to thwart his mission. "No
doubt the Colonization party will resort to some base measures
to prevent, if possible, my departure for England,"2 he warned
Knapp and instructed him to print the story in the Liberator.
The more he considered the incident, the larger it loomed;
and by the time he reached New York it had acquired the
dimensions of a gigantic conspiracy. He enjoyed intrigue, and
besides, cloak-and-dagger tales made good copy.

He was going to England as an agent of the New England
Society to raise funds for a manual labor school for Negroes.
The manual labor idea was an important part of the New
England Society's program. The scheme originated in Switzer-
land and had been tried in several European countries before
the Reverend George W. Gale brought it to the Oneida
Institute in western New York. The plan provided that each
student pay part of his expenses by working on the school
farm, thereby reducing the costs of education and ensuring
the health of the student, which, so the theory went, might be
endangered by long hours of study. Such institutions, it was
hoped, would provide rural havens of simplicity where young
men could escape the wiles and snares of sophisticated society.
Most of the theological schools in die country had already
adopted a modified version of voluntary manual labor, but at
Oneida work was compulsory. The Board of Managers of the
New England Society were so impressed with the favorable
reports from Oneida that they decided to combine the idea
with Negro education in New England. In March, 1833, they
appointed Garrison an agent to "proceed to England as soon
as the necessary arrangements can be made, for the purpose of
procuring funds to aid in the establishment of the proposed
MANUAL LABOR SCHOOL FOR COLORED YOUTH/'8 Since the treas-
ury lacked funds for the trip, Garrison spent six weeks making
a series of farewell appearances in Boston, Providence, New

TRIUMPH AND DOUBT IN 1833 157

York, and Philadelphia dunning his colored friends. By April
he had nearly six hundred dollars, enough for traveling ex-
penses, and on the first of May he embarked for Liverpool.

His own motives for undertaking the trip he kept to him-
self. He knew that Elliot Cresson, the agent of the Coloniza-
tion Society, was conducting a fund-raising tour of the British
Isles. Using his reputation as the fearless editor of the Liber-
ator and author of Thoughts on African Colonization, he
meant to unmask Cresson and his organization and establish
himself as the undisputed leader of American anti-slavery.
He also knew that Charles Stuart, a member of Tappan's
New York circle and an opponent of the Colonization So-
ciety, was already in England denouncing Cresson wherever
he went. Stuart was a retired British army captain who once
had been court-martialed for refusing to fire on a group of
East Indian natives. A bachelor with an effusive manner and
eccentric habits, he was also a spirited polemicist who would
have no difficulty in disposing of Cresson, Finally, Garrison
knew that the English abolitionists, already within sight of
their goal, needed no enlightenment on the American Coloni-
zation Society. Only a year ago Thomas Buxton had written
to tell him that it was wholly unnecessary for him "to set me,
or any of the true Anti-Slavery Party in this Country on our
guard against the delusive professions of the Colonization
Society or its Agent."4 Still, if his newly acquired prestige
was to be of any help to him, he must make the pilgrimage to
London and personally receive the blessing of the English
anti-slavery veterans. Thus from the beginning his mission
took on the aspects of a publicity campaign to which the
intrigues surrounding his departure were a fitting prologue.

After a short passage of three weeks, most of which he
spent miserably seasick in his cabin, he stepped down the
gangplank at Liverpool wearied in "flesh and spirit." He did

158 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

not see the nearby slums that so appalled Melville, but re-
ported that the city seemed "bustling, prosperous, and great"
in its "commercial aspect." He rested a few days at Dingle
Bank, James Cropper's country house, before continuing to
London. He already spoke of Cropper as his "excellent
friend," though he had yet to meet him, his host having pro-
ceeded to London before his arrival. Cropper more than ful-
filled his description when Garrison joined him in London,
for he more than anyone else was responsible for his Ameri-
can friend's remarkable success. Cropper was one of the group
of wealthy Quaker merchants who supplied the cause of West
Indian emancipation with new energy. Prudent and grave,
given to weighty pronouncements but a shrewd judge of men,
he knew everyone of consequence in the anti-slavery move-
ment and himself was much admired by his colleagues.

On his arrival in London on May 27, Garrison discovered
that almost every important English abolitionist had gathered
in the offices of the society and the nearby Guildhall Coffee
House to watch the passage of the West India Emancipation
Bill through Parliament. Cropper took him to breakfast at the
Coffee House and, much to Garrison's delight, introduced
him as the distinguished agent of the New England Anti-
Slavery Society. Realizing how timely his arrival was, he pri-
vately gave thanks to Providence for ordering events for him
"in a manner so highly auspicious." Now came a round of
visits to anti-slavery notables, beginning with a breakfast with
Buxton. Presented to the great Parliamentary leader, he was
not a little disconcerted when, instead of stepping forward to
shake his hand, Buxton sat staring at him doubtfully. Finally,
after a full minute of embarrassing silence, he asked, "Have I
the pleasure of addressing Mr. Garrison, of Boston, in the
United States?" Upon Garrison's assurance that such indeed
was the case, Buxton again paused and then said in evident be-

TRIUMPH AND DOUBT IN 1833 159

wilderment, "Why, my dear sir, I thought you were a black
man! And I have consequently invited this company of ladies
and gentlemen to be present to welcome Mr. Garrison, the
black advocate of emancipation from the United States of
America." Whatever his private feelings, Garrison promptly
replied that Buxton's was the only compliment he cared to
remember.5

At Bath he spent five hours with the failing Wilberforce
blissfully unaware of the old man's feeble condition. "I en-
deavored to communicate as briefly and clearly as possible, all
the prominent facts relating to our great controversy," he re-
ported to the Board of Managers. "I impressed upon his mind,
tenderly and solemnly, the importance of his bearing public
testimony against the American Colonization Society."6 Wil-
berforce denied that he had ever considered colonization the
sole remedy for American slavery, but agreed with his dog-
matic young visitor that he should officially withdraw his
support.

Thomas Clarkson, doddering and now almost totally blind,
proved less tractable than his old friend and was not to be won
over by the importunings of his uninvited guest. He was a
good friend of Cresson's and knew many of the leading colo-
nizationists in the United States well. Although he too be-
lieved that the society was only a first step toward emancipa-
tion, he was determined not to become involved in what
seemed to him a foolish controversy. After four hours of fruit-
less argument in which Garrison "spared no pains to correct
the erroneous views which he had formed," he left, lamenting
that Clarkson should still feel it to be his duty to occupy
neutral ground.7

On his return to London, Garrison found awaiting him a
protest signed by Wilberforce and ten other English veterans
denouncing the claims of die Colonization Society as "wholly

160 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

groundless. " The protest, probably the work of Cropper and
Charles Stuart, came as a welcome surprise. Lest his Ameri-
can critics accuse him of intentional malice, he hastened to
disclaim all responsibility for the declaration. "In getting up
this protest," he explained to the New England Society on
his return, "I had no agency whatever. It was altogether un-
expected by me."8 The eleven signatures nevertheless repre-
sented a major achievement — the primary purpose of the
mission had been fulfilled. Now he had only to show himself
to the British public as the lion of American abolitionism by
devouring the Colonization Society's sacrificial lamb, Elliot
Cresson.

Upon reaching London in May he had written a letter to
Cresson accusing him of bilking the English public and chal-
lenging him to a public debate. Cresson naturally refused to
participate in such unseemly proceedings, whereupon Garri-
son sent an open letter to The Times of London charging
him with cowardice. In July, Charles Stuart, who had been
dogging Cresson's footsteps ever since his arrival, reported
that a meeting was being planned to organize a British
Colonization Society. Would Garrison attend and testify
against Cresson? Garrison would do more — he would con-
tact the Duke of Sussex, Cresson's patron, and try to dissuade
him from supporting the project. Garrison failed to convince
the duke, but Stuart succeeded in collecting a group of
abolitionists including an ardent young agitator named
George Thompson to attend the colonization meeting and,
if possible, disrupt it. The Hanover Square meeting of the
English colonizationists barely escaped the fate which Gar-
rison had prepared for it. Of the one hundred and twenty
present nearly one half were abolitionists rounded up by
Cropper, Stuart, and Thompson. The Duke of Sussex, who

TRIUMPH AND DOUBT IN 1833 l6l

presided, was bombarded with hostile questions. Finally, over
the fierce protests of the abolitionists the majority voted to
organize an English colonization society. Now there was
only one recourse left to the anti-slavery party — • a meeting
of their own "as an offset," as Garrison put it, at which he
should be given free voice.

The Exeter Hall meeting on Saturday morning, July 13,
proved a resounding success. Garrison spoke for over two
hours. In his speech he adhered closely to his plan for posing
as the appointed agent of American anti-slavery reformers. "I
cherish as strong a love for the land of my nativity as any
man living. . . ." he told his audience. "But I have some
solemn accusations to bring against her." America was guilty
of "insulting the majesty of Heaven" by giving an open, de-
liberate and base denial to her boasted Declaration. She had
legalized licentiousness, fraud, cruelty and murder. In the
course of his diatribe he referred to the Constitution, a sub-
ject to which he returned a few days later in an article for
the London "Patriot in an attempt to show that he had broken
all national ties.

I know [he wrote] that there is much declamation about the
sacredness of the compact which was formed between the free
and the slave States in the adoption of the National Constitution.
A sacred compact, forsooth! I pronounce it the most bloody and
Heaven-daring arrangement ever made by men for the continu-
ance and protection of the most atrocious villainy ever exhibited
on earth. Yes, I recognize the compact, but with feelings of shame
and indignation; and it will be held in everlasting infamy by the
friends of humanity and justice throughout the world. Who or
what were the framers of the American government that they
should dare confirm and authorize such high-handed villainy —
such a flagrant robbery of the inalienable rights of man — such a
glaring violation of all the precepts and injunctions of the gospel

162 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GAJMUSON

— such a savage war upon a sixth part of the whole population?
It was not valid then — it is not valid now.9

Garrison's second object, to win acceptance as the official
representative of American abolitionists, required a bit more
ingenuity. In fact, he had approached Arthur Tappan and
his friends for funds only to be refused. Tappan could not
see that the British needed indoctrination in their own prin-
ciples, and thought that any appeal for funds was premature.
He even suspected that the real purpose of Garrison's mission
was to inflate his own reputation, a shrewd guess as the
Exeter Hall speech showed. "I have crossed the Atlantic on
an errand of mercy," Garrison announced, "to plead for
perishing millions and to discharge, in behalf of the abolition-
ists of the United States, a high moral obligation which is
due the British public." He would not bore them with a
"lachrymal display" of his losses and crosses in the cause, but
it was well known in America that he had stood, "almost
single-handed for a series of years, against and in the midst
of a nation of oppressors." If anyone could rightfully claim
the sympathy of the English reformers, it was a man who
had endured the wrath of his country for righteousness' sake.

Near the end of his marathon performance he was inter-
rupted by the arrival of the great Irish orator Daniel O'Con-
nell, who had come to pay his respects. When he had
finished, O'Connell strode to the platform and "threw off a
speech as he threw off his coat," denouncing the Colonization
Society and praising the wisdom of the New England Anti-
Slavery Society in sending such an able advocate to English
shores. Not since he printed the first number of the Liberator
had Garrison been so well pleased with a day's work.

One final appearance and he could return home. On July
2«^, three days after the second reading of the West India

TRIUMPH AND DOUBT IN 1833 163

Emancipation Bill, Wilberforce died. In the endless funeral
train to Westminster Abbey, behind princes of the blood,
prelates of the Church, members of Parliament walked the
grave bespectacled American with eyes piously lowered as if
in a solemn recessional after the initiatory rites. When it came
time to embark, he found he lacked the money for the return
passage. Rather than approach Cropper and his friends, he
borrowed two hundred dollars from Nathaniel Paul, a Negro
minister and protege of Tappan who was also collecting funds
for a manual labor school. He promised to repay the loan to
Tappan just as soon as he was able, but secretly he wondered
how soon that would be. On August 18 he boarded the
packet Hannibal and arrived in New York five weeks later.

Sitting in his cabin and reflecting on the summer's events,
he had reason to be satisfied. Financially the trip had proved
a failure, but he brought back with him the valuable protest,
testimonials from Cropper and Thompson, and even a per-
sonal tribute from Zachary Macaulay thanking him for his
"eminent services . . . rendered to the cause of humanity."10
He had directed the rout of the colonization forces, paid a
last tribute to the great Wilberforce, and made innumerable
new friends. Most important, he returned with the recogni-
tion and good will he needed to build an American anti-
slavery movement.

He stepped off the boat in New York to find the stage set
for his entrance. While he was basking in the limelight of
English flattery, the American reformers under the direction
of Arthur Tappan were writing the script and casting the
principals for the anti-slavery drama which played the Amer-
ican stage for the next thirty years. American abolitionism
from its inception was the product of two distinct groups,
one in New England under Garrison, the other in New York

164 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

and the Ohio Valley under transplanted New Englanders
like Theodore Weld, Beriah Green, Elizur Wright and Henry
Stanton. As a patron of American reform with connections
in both the East and the West, Arthur Tappan was a pivotal
figure in the formation of a national anti-slavery society. His
New York Committee served as a clearinghouse for abolition-
ist projects, distributed information, and functioned as a di-
rectory for reformers everywhere. It was Tappan's great
achievement in the year 1833 to join together the Eastern
and Western branches of the anti-slavery movement into a
single national organ, an achievement which no amount of
Garrisonian disparagement could ever undo.

Tappan's interest in the West dated from the autumn of
1829 and the appearance in New York City of the great
revivalist Charles Grandison Finney. If Lyman Beecher served
as the archpriest of the eastern half of the Benevolent Em-
pire, the New West belonged to Finney. Just as Beecher's
version of "immediate repentance" provided the theological
underpinnings for Garrisonism, so Finney's Arminian doc-
trine of the "new heart," at once simpler and bolder than
Beecher's, supplied the rationale for Western anti-slavery.11

Tappan's lieutenant and the leader of the Western anti-
slavery movement was a convert of Finney's, Theodore Weld,
an unkempt, sad-eyed evangelical whose quiet intensity and
natural shrewdness brought him quickly to the front of the
movement. Modest and circumspect as he seemed, Weld was
a natural leader of men, an astute judge of character, and an
efficient organizer — all the things that Garrison was not. He
had been lecturing on the temperance circuit when the Tap-
pans, struck by his promotional talents and forceful presence,
decided to have the sole use of so brilliant a lecturer and gave
him the job of raising funds and selecting the site for a great

TRIUMPH AND DOUBT IN 1833 165

theological seminary in the West based on the manual labor
plan. In the fall of 1831, while Garrison was busy sending
copies of the Liberator into the Ohio Valley, Weld set out
on a tour of the West and South, addressing legislatures,
colleges, churches and philanthropists on the subject of man-
ual labor. His campaign took him as far south as Huntsville,
Alabama, where he met James G. Birney, an' earnest young
country lawyer whose austere Presbyterian conscience had
convinced him of the wrongfulness of slavery. Just as Garri-
son had first turned hopefully to the American Colonization
Society for an answer to the problem, so Birney and Weld
studied the society's program and weighed the justice of re-
turning the Negro to Africa. Though Weld could not doubt
the sinfulness of slavery, as yet he knew little about it, and
Birney's searching questions and Scriptural arguments set him
thinking. His effect on the Alabama lawyer was no less pro-
nounced: when Weld started north after nearly a month in
Huntsville, Birney abandoned a flourishing legal practice to
become an agent of the American Colonization Society.

From now on Weld, like Garrison before him, occupied
himself almost exclusively with the study of American slav-
ery. The turning point in his career came with his visit to the
wilderness campus of Western Reserve College in Hudson,
Ohio, late in November, 1832. Here he met Elizur Wright
and Beriah Green, two faculty members who had been con-
verted to abolition by Garrison's Thoughts. "You will re-
collect," Wright admitted to Garrison soon after his talks
with Weld, "that in a letter some time ago, I expressed some
doubts with regard to the correctness of your views in respect
to the African colony. Your 'Thoughts on African Coloniza-
tion' have dispelled these doubts. I find that I was misin-
formed, as doubtless thousands are, in regard to your opin-

i66 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GABRISQN

ions."12 Using Garrison's moral arguments, Wright and Green
converted Weld to immediate emancipation and convinced
him that "the very first business is to shove off the lubberly
Colonization Society which is, at the very best, a superim-
posed dead weight."13 Such was Garrison's message as the
faculty at Western Reserve interpreted it. "The question now
is, what shall be done?" Wright wrote to Weld in Decem-
ber. aWe would put one hundred copies of the Liberator
into as many towns on the Reserve, if we knew where to
find the means." They planned to form a local anti-slavery
society* he told Weld, but what was needed was a national
organization along the lines of the other benevolent societies.
"What would benevolent men in N. York think of a con-
vention on this subject, about the time of the anniversaries
next spring?"14

As he traveled east to New York City in January, 1833,
Weld was pondering Wright's suggestion when he received a
letter from Garrison inviting him to Boston to address the
New England Society on the subject of manual labor. Weld
refused, pleading prior engagements in New York City. "Be-
sides, Sir," he went on, "I am ignorant of the history, specific
plans, modes of operation, present position and ultimate aims
of the N.E. Anti-Slavery Society. Residing in the interior of
the state of New York, I have been quite out of range of its
publications, have never seen any of them or indeed any
expose of its operations, and all the definite knowledge of its
plans and principles which I possess has been thro the perver-
sions and distortions of its avowed opposers." Yet he could
see by the "expressive name" of Garrison's organization that
its sentiments agreed with his — that

Nothing but crime can forfeit liberty. That no condition of
birth, no shade of color, no mere misfortune of circumstance,

TRIUMPH AND DOUBT IN 1833 167

can annul that birth-right charter, which God has bequeathed
to every being upon whom he has stamped his own image,
by making him a free moral agent, and that he who robs his
fellow-man of this tramples upon right, subverts justice, out-
rages humanity, unsettles the foundations of human safety and
sacrilegiously assumes the prerogatives of God; and further, that
he who retains by force, and refuses to surrender that which was
originally obtained by violence or fraud, is joint partner in the
original sin, becomes its apologist and makes it the business of
every moment to perpetuate it afresh, however he may lull his
conscience by the vain pleas of expediency or necessity.15

Reading Weld's letter, the very phrases of which were
familiar, Garrison recognized his own arguments from the
pen of a man who had never even heard of him. The Liber-
ator had done its work well on the Western Reserve.

Garrison walked down the gangplank in New York to
find the scene prepared for his arrival. In the spring of 1833,
just as he had sailed for England, Arthur Tappan set his anti-
slavery plans in motion. Elizur Wright came to New York
to serve as secretary to the New York Committee, and Tap-
pan dispatched him to Boston to scout out Garrison's society.
In Boston, Wright met his old Yale classmate Amos Phelps,
who gave him news of Garrison's successes in England.
Wright found that New York lagged behind Boston and
told the Tappan brothers so. As summer drew on and the
New Yorkers waited for reports on the West India Bill, they
accelerated their program of agitation by distributing copies
of Garrison's Thoughts and launching the Emancipator.
Then, hearing the news of the victory in Parliament, they
decided to call a meeting of "The Friends of Immediate
Abolition in the United States" on October 2 in Clinton
Hall* On the day of the meeting posters were tacked up all
over the city:

l68 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

NOTICE
TO ALL PERSONS FROM THE SOUTH

All persons interested in the subject of a meeting
called by J. Leavitt, W. Green, Jr., W. Goodell,
J. Rankin, Lewis Tappan, at Clinton Hall, this
evening at 7 o'clock, are requested to attend at
the same hour and place.

MANY SOUTHERNERS

N.B. All Citizens who may feel disposed to mani-
fest the true feeling of the State on this subject,
are requested to attend.

That same evening a mob of some fifteen hundred New
Yorkers stood in front of Clinton Hall yelling for the blood
of Arthur Tappan and William Lloyd Garrison. In their
midst stood Garrison himself, who had come to help organ-
ize the New York Anti-Slavery Society and was now wan-
dering among them unrecognized.

Although Garrison was in no way responsible for the
Clinton Hall demonstration, a rumor had circulated that he
was back in the city and would attend the meeting. His
Exeter Hall address had jarred the nerves of patriotic New
York journalists, one of whom demanded that the "many-
headed Hydra" be "nipped in the bud." "He comes in the
flush of triumph," complained another, "and with the flatteries
still on his ear of those who wish not well to your country."10
Promptly at seven o'clock on Wednesday, October 2, he ar-
rived at Clinton Hall only to find it locked and surrounded
by an angry crowd. Learning of the proposed demonstration,
the trustees had hastily withdrawn their permission to hold
the meeting there, whereupon Tappan and his friends ad-
journed to the Chatham Street Chapel uptown. Garrison, un-

TRIUMPH AND DOUBT IN 1833 169

aware of the change in plans and afraid that he might be
recognized any moment by the mob shouting his name, turned
on his heel and left.

Meanwhile the mob moved on to Tammany Hall for a
meeting of their own. On the platform in the front of the
dusty hall sat two of the city's well-known newspapermen,
Colonel Webb and young James Gordon Bennett, who had
brought along with them the Portland Yankee John Neal,
Garrison's old nemesis. All three were hostile to the abolition-
ists and not averse to stirring up a mob if they could thereby
upset Arthur Tappan's plans. Under the mistaken impression
that Garrison was the real instigator of the meeting at Clinton
Hall and was now somewhere in the audience, Neal stepped
to the edge of the platform and demanded that he come for-
ward and defend his views. Hearing no response, he plunged
into a denunciation of anti-slavery. Suddenly word came that
Tappan and his friends could be found in the Chatham
Street Chapel, and with a roar the crowd poured out of
Tammany headed for Chatham Street. There they found the
huge iron gates to the chapel locked. Inside, the abolitionists
were just completing the order of business. While the mob
outside debated the best way of forcing their way in, the
abolitionists hurriedly appointed a couple of committees, ad-
journed sine die and fled by the rear door just as a horde of
rioters swarmed in the front entrance. Once in the chapel
they held a mock meeting presided over by a frightened
Negro whom they had collared on the way and dubbed
"Arthur Tappan," and after an hour's frolic they dispersed.

Not until the next morning did Garrison learn he had been
a part of the proceedings, whereupon he quickly slipped into
the role of the coolheaded knight-errant who stood bravely
by while a hysterical mob shouted for his head. Back in Bos-
ton he told his readers of his reception.

170 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GAKRISON

As soon as I landed, I turned the city of New York upside down.
Five thousand people turned out to see me tarred and feathered,
but were disappointed. As to the menaces and transactions of the
New York mob, I regard them with mingled emotions of pity
and contempt. I was an eye-witness of that mob, from the hour
of its assembling at Clinton Hall to its final assault upon the
Chatham Street Chapel - standing by it, undisguisedly, as calm
in my feelings as if those who were seeking my life were my
warmest supporters. ... For myself, I am ready to brave any
danger, even unto death.17

It was no wonder, he went on, that New York raged at
his triumph - "the secret of their malice lies in the triumph-
ant success of my mission. Had I failed to vanquish the agent
of the American Colonization Society, or to open the eyes
of the British philanthropists to its naked deformity, there
would have been no excitement on my return."18 Frustrated
in their attempt to discredit him in England, the colonization-
ists resorted to violence at home: the Clinton Hall mob had
been collected for the sole purpose of destroying William
Lloyd Garrison.

Following his providential escape from the clutches of the
colonizationists, he was more determined than ever to srtike
for a national society while his reputation still glowed. The
Liberator was bankrupt and he owed Arthur Tappan the two
hundred dollars he had borrowed from Nathaniel Paul. If
ever he needed organized support outside of Boston it was
now. "I am more and more impressed with the importance
of "working whilst the day lasts,' " he wrote early in Novem-
ber. "If 'we all do fade as a leaf/ — if we are 'as the sparks
that fly upwards' — if the billows of time are swiftly remov-
ing the sandy foundations of our life — what we intend to
do for the captive, and for our country, and for the subjuga-
tion of a hostile world, must be done quickly/'1* In short,

TRIUMPH AND DOXJBT IN 1833 171

it was time to cash in. on his reputation before it was too late.

The New York Committee was of a different mind, for the
Clinton Hall affair indicated to them the need for moderation.
Winter was nearly upon them and travel from the West
would be expensive and hazardous. Better wait until spring
wheji the delegates to the annual meetings of the benevolent
societies would be congregating in New York. Then there
would be a possibility of calling a real convention. Garrison
refused to listen to these arguments and insisted that the call
go forth at once. Postponing the meeting, he fumed, meant
capitulating to the mob. Against their better judgment the
committee gave way before his hectoring and drew up a
circular inviting all the friends of abolition to a convention
to be held in Philadelphia on December 4. They explained
their change of plans by citing the urgency of the cause,
which "must be injured by unnecessary delay" because "the
public expectation is already excited. . . . We have before
us numerous examples of similar organizations, which, though
feeble and obscure, and condemned by public opinion in the
outset, have speedily risen to great influence, and have been
the means, under God, of immense benefit to the human
race."20 The reasoning sounded suspiciously Garrisonian,
Privately Wright confided to Weld his own doubts as to the
practicality of their decision, but admitted that "the most cool
and collected friends of the cause here felt this to be a neces-
sity, after a full view of the case."21 Garrison had won his
point.

His New England delegation assembled at New York's
City Hotel on the first day of December and, accompanied
by Tappan's deputies, proceeded to Philadelphia, where they
joined Beriah Green and his small contingent from Ohio and
a sizable deputation of Pennsylvania Quakers. At an informal
meeting at the home of Evan Lewis on the eve of the con-

ryz THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

vention the delegates attempted to find a wealthy Phila-
delphian to preside over the meetings. Both Robert Vaux,
Cresson's friend, and another prominent citizen declined the
offer, at which point the laconic Beriah Green announced
that if there was not enough presidential timber among them-
selves, they would have to get along without such a figure
"or go home and stay there until we have grown up to be
men." Taking Green at his word, the delegates elected him
to preside over the convention which assembled the next
morning at Adelphi Hall of Fifth Street.

Garrison's spirit dominated the members of the convention,
but he himself did not. While they admired his dedication
and perseverance, the delegates were in no mood to be stam-
peded into hasty decisions. Many of them agreed with Lewis
Tappan that Garrison's name ought not to be "inserted promi-
nently" lest it "keep away many professed friends of aboli-
tion."22 Still, that name might be worth a good deal when it
came time to appeal to the English for help. Even if he was
notorious and overly concerned with his good name, he
stood for the Christian zeal they intended to foster. Thus he
found himself cast in a double role as the guiding spirit and
the wandering Jew of American abolition, constantly ex-
tolled but at the same time carefully prevented from leading
the convention into the wilderness of Scriptural quotation.

On the first day a committee was elected to draw up a con-
stitution. He was excused from this task and placed instead
on a larger and less important committee heavily weighted
with moderates like Whittier, May, Jocelyn, and Green,
which was charged with composing a Declaration of Senti-
ments. This group promptly delegated the work to a sub-
committee consisting of May, Whittier, and Garrison, in the
hope that May's good sense and Whittier's Quaker humility
might blunt the shafts of Garrison's prose. Whittier and May

TRIUMPH AND DOUBT IN 1833 173

left him in the evening of the first day sitting at a table in his
room drafting the document and returned the next morning
to find him still bent over the manuscript. As they had feared,
his Magna Carta contained a full-page diatribe on coloniza-
tion which, if anything, outstripped his earlier exercises in
invective. Fortunately, the full committee spent three hours
pruning the declaration of its excrescences and the members
insisted on excising the passage on colonization. Garrison
fought hard to save it, arguing that colonization and slavery
stood or fell together, and only reluctantly accepted the
majority opinion. "All right, brethren," he finally agreed
after all his objections had been disregarded, "it is your report,

not mine."23

The Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-
Slavery Society opens with a pointed reference to the meet-
ing of the signers of the Declaration of Independence in the
same city fifty-seven years before. "We have met together
for the achievement of an enterprise without which that of
our fathers is incomplete; and which, for its magnitude,
solemnity, and probable results upon the destiny of the world,
as far transcends theirs as moral truth does physical force."
In view of its promises of liberty and equality the United
States is the guiltiest nation on the face of the earth:

It is bound to repent instantly, to undo the heavy burdens, and
to let the oppressed go free. . . . The right to enjoy liberty is
inalienable. To invade it is to usurp the prerogative of Jehovah.
Every man has a right to his own body — to the products of his
own labor — to the protection of law — and to the common ad-
vantages of society. . . .

That all those laws which are now in force, admitting the right
of slavery, are therefore before God, utterly null and void; being
an audacious usurpation of the Divine prerogative, a daring in-
fringement on the law of nature, a base overthrow of the very

174 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

foundations of the social compact, a complete extinction of all
the relations, endearments and obligations of mankind, and a
presumptuous transgression of all the holy commandments; and
that therefore they ought instantly to be abrogated.

Fully and unanimously recognizing the sovereignty of each
state, but maintaining the right of Congress to regulate slav-
ery in the territories under its jurisdiction, the delegates
pledged themselves to rely on moral suasion and "spare no
exertions nor means to bring the whole nation to speedy
repentance."

The declaration reached the floor of the convention on
December 5. Thomas Shipley, the Quaker delegate from
Philadelphia, objected to the indiscriminate use of the word
"man~stealer" and suggested the qualifying phrase "accord-
ing to scripture," which was accepted despite Garrison's
protest that the change appeared to make liberty dependent
on Biblical sanction. Lucretia Mott, who attended all the
sessions, offered a few verbal changes, but except for the
colonization branch which had already been lopped off in
committee, the declaration was accepted almost as it was
written. With a smile of obvious pleasure Garrison watched
as each delegate stepped gravely forward to sign his name.

Satisfying too was Lewis Tappan's eulogy placing him "in
die forefront of our ranks. . . . He has told the whole truth,
and put hypocrites and doughfaces to open shame. . . . He
has put the anti-slavery movement forward a quarter of a
century." Tappan could not deny his young friend's many
"imprudences," but it was clear, he said, that God had raised
just such a zealot to lead them. "Let each member present
feel solemnly bound to vindicate the character of Mr. Garri-
son," he concluded, scarcely realizing the awesomeness of
such a task. Dr. Abraham Cox then begged leave to read

TRIUMPH AND DOUBT IN 1833 175

Whittier's tribute, "W.L.G.," and sonorously intoned the six
stanzas which began:

Champion of those who groan beneath

Oppression's iron hand:
In view of penury, hate, and death

I see thee fearless stand,
Still bearing up thy lofty brow

In the steadfast strength of truth,
In manhood sealing well the vow

And promise of thy youth.

The crown of laurels was not without its thorns. As the
election of officers approached, the delegates were perplexed
to know just what honor to distribute to their hero. The
committee in charge of drawing up the constitution agreed
that Elizur Wright should be the secretary of the society.
The presidency obviously should go to Arthur Tappan, who,
though unable to attend the meeting, was the man most
responsible for its success. But what to do with Garrison?
Would he accept a vice-presidency or a place on the Execu-
tive Committee — would he, in short, be willing to play sec-
ond fiddle? The problem was solved temporarily when one
of the delegates suggested that they create the office of secre-
tary of foreign correspondence and ease Garrison into it.
Accordingly, he was given the special post, which he held
for six weeks before resigning in a huff after being told that
all correspondence should be first submitted to the Executive
Committee. His resignation gave the new society the answer
to their question — Garrison would play second fiddle to no
one.

There was one final problem for him to solve before he
returned to Boston, and this was the matter of repaying Tap-
pan the two hundred dollars borrowed from Nathaniel Paul

176 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

At the moment he hadn't a penny. To make matters worse,
the Liberator was still saddled with a thousand dollars' worth
of unsold anti-slavery tracts. Unless he received some help —
and that soon — the Liberator would surely go under. He
therefore went to the new Executive Committee with a
proposition. The society should undertake to buy four hun-
dred and forty dollars worth of pamphlets (a large proportion
of them his Thoughts}. This, he explained, was the very
least he required to save the Liberator. But the committee
pointed out that the society lacked the funds to purchase so
much as a single tract At this point Arthur Tappan saved
the day by offering to advance Garrison the money out of
his own pocket and to let the society owe him. Whereupon
Garrison announced that it would not be necessary to raise
the whole amount since he already owed Tappan two hun-
dred dollars. Now, after paying him his two hundred and
forty dollar balance, the society could owe the remaining
two hundred to Tappan, who in turn could owe it to Paul,
and he, Garrison, would no longer owe anybody anything.
To his own satisfaction if not that of the Executive Commit-
tee, he had saved his paper, paid for his return passage, and
cleared his skirts of debt.24

In Boston once again he sat down to cast up his accounts
of the last twelve months. In many ways it had been a grati-
fying year — his triumph in England, the organization of a
national society, and a growing number of followers. "Al-
most every day brings some intelligence highly favorable to
our cause," he wrote.25 Beacon fires of liberty were beginning
to burn all over the country. There was only one cause for
dissatisfaction — despite the accolades heaped on him in Phila-
delphia, the American abolitionists had declined to accept his
leadership. He had won their praises but not their support; a
national society did not admit of the personal control he

TRIUMPH AND DOUBT IN 1833 *77

exercised over the New England Society. At Philadelphia
he had met men every bit as devoted as he was, tough-minded
and outspoken reformers who were not to be intimidated by
belligerence however righteous. They wanted what Elizur
Wright called "the right kind of fire," and they were pre-
pared to build it themselves. He told his Boston partisans that
uby dint of some industry and much persuasion, I succeeded
in inducing the abolitionists in New York to join our little
band in Boston in calling a national convention," but in his
heart he knew that this was not so.26 Already anti-slavery
was growing faster than he had anticipated. To keep from
being swallowed up in the national movement he must assert
his control over his own followers.

With this object in mind he introduced a resolution at the
monthly meeting of the New England Society in February,
1834, requesting the Board of Managers to call a convention
of delegates from all the local groups in New England. "Our
grand aim should now be to effect a complete concentration
of all the anti-slavery strength we can muster that division
may not weaken our efforts and that we may all see eye to
eye."27 His purpose, he said, was not to make the auxiliary
societies subservient to the New England Society, but "to
devise ways and means for the promotion of our glorious
cause." Just what these means were New England abolition-
ists were to learn in the course of the next four years as one
by one he produced them for their approval — woman's
rights, nonresistance, and Christian perfectionism. Having
failed to capture the national society, he began gathering his
forces for a second assault.

Mobs and Martyrs

IN SEPTEMBER, 1834, Garrison married Helen Eliza Benson
of Brooklyn, Connecticut. His marriage, a singularly happy
one, afforded the additional advantage of allying his own
Boston followers with the anti-slavery forces in southern
New England. Helen's father, old George Benson, had been
an abolitionist ever since he helped found the Providence
Anti-Slavery Society back in 1792. At the time of his daugh-
ter's marriage the eighty-two-year-old Benson was president
of the New England Anti-Slavery Society and the patriarch
of a large family known for its austere moral code. A mem-
ber of the prosperous Providence firm of Brown, Benson and
Ives, he had retired in 1796 after a heated quarrel with his
partners and withdrawn to his Brooklyn farmhouse, where
he spent the rest of his life directing projects for Christian
reform. To the Benson farm came Benjamin Lundy and Wil-
liam Ladd, young John Whittier, Samuel May, and finally
Garrison himself to ask Benson's advice and the help of his
two sons, George, Jr., and Henry.

Twenty-three-year-old Helen, her father's favorite, was a
plain girl with heavy features and placid expression, self-
conscious, shy, quick, practical and shrewd. Her sensitivity
and quiet humor, hidden beneath a self-effacing manner, quite
escaped her husband, whose very real devotion did not in-

MOBS AND MARTYRS 179

crease his power of perception, Helen's was a selfless love,
the antithesis of Fanny's possessive worship of her son. Garri-
son still clung to the memory of his mother but married her
opposite.

Helen first met Garrison on the eve of his departure for
England when he spoke one evening at the African Church in
Providence. Her brother George, an ardent abolitionist like
his father, brought her along to hear the Boston Daniel bait
the lions of College Hill, and after the lecture he introduced
her to the great Garrison. Later they both testified to the
f atefulness of this meeting, but within a week he was off to
England, and nearly a year passed before he opened his
campaign for her hand.1

A campaign it was, complete with Stendhalian strategies
for trapping the unwary Helen. For one who boldly courted
notoriety, Garrison was a timid lover as though fearful of
bruising his ego in an open encounter. He knew just the kind
of wife he wanted — a woman of "good sense" and "talent,"
given to no "unseemly familiarity of conduct" or "reckless
disregard of all the rules of propriety." In short, a wife with
a spirit exactly in unison with his own, who would provide
home and family and submit to his mastery. Even when
Helen Benson met all these demands, he was slow to declare
himself. When his veiled hints and constant probing drove
her to protest her unworthiness to be the wife of a great
humanitarian, he replied peevishly that he had been "both
vain and presumptuous" — "vain, in supposing that my letters
can either amuse or interest you — presumptuous in thrusting
them so frequently upon your notice."2 Whereupon poor
Helen confessed — if he might overlook her many deficien-
cies, "I see not why I may not gratefully acknowledge your
attention in conferring so high an obligation upon me, and I
sincerely respond to every tender expression of feeling. . . .

180 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

I have opened my heart to you."3 Then followed his own
belated declaration. "Oh! generous, confiding, excellent girl!
Do you then reciprocate my love? Yes, my fears are dis-
pelled, my hopes confirmed — and I shed delicious tears of
joy! ... I did not dare to presume that you regarded me
with so much esteem."4

His own self-esteem intact and master of the situation once
more, he lectured poor Helen on the impropriety of flattering
him and apprised her of her duties. She must guard against
becoming "exalted in her mind" as well as against "excessive
humility." She should avoid "all tawdry and artificial aids to
the embellishment of her person." It was a wonderful favor,
he reminded her, to be a dutiful child of God, an obedient
disciple of the meek and lowly Jesus, and he prayed that she
be kept from the temptations and snares of the world, from
slothfulness and folly.5

Helen responded eagerly to his suggestions, anxious lest
Lloyd, as she now called him, think her "not sufficiently
grateful." She loved him, she admitted, "a thousand times
more than my tongue or pen can utter."6

Having carried his siege, Garrison wanted to be married
as soon as possible. Gallantly he addressed her as his "Charm-
ing Conqueror" but added the sobering reflection that their
contemplated union "gives universal satisfaction among my
friends both white and colored."7 He gave precise instruc-
tions for the wedding: no "extravagance" or "eccentricity,"
no "showy kind" of wedding cake or expensive gifts. The
ceremony to be performed by May and held in the morn-
ing to allow the wedding party to reach Worcester by night-
fall. He had rented a small house in Roxbury which he
called Freedom's Cottage. Without consulting Helen he
furnished it and hired a housekeeper whom he assured her
was "modest" in her deportment and "genteel in her ap-

MOBS AND MARTYRS l8l

pearance." Helen applauded his new domesticity. "Do not
fear but everything will suit me/' she wrote. "I can assure
you I am not difficult."8

Following a ceremony tailored to the bridegroom's speci-
fications, the wedding party, including Garrison's Aunt
Charlotte and Helen's companion Elizabeth Chace, set out
for Freedom's Cottage and a well-chaperoned honeymoon.
In Worcester, Garrison lost his baggage, and the cars made
Aunt Charlotte violently ill The party arrived in Roxbury
to find Isaac Knapp and his sister, their new boarders, al-
ready comfortably installed. Even the irrepressible Garrison
admitted that the arrival was "gloomy enough." Two days
later his equanimity had returned, and he was able to report
to Helen's sister Anna that the Garrisons eagerly awaited
a visit from the Bensons. "I can hardly realize as yet, that I
am married," he added, "although I have one of the best
wives in the world." She fulfilled his every expectation. "Her
disposition is certainly remarkable — so uniformly placid,
so generous and disinterested, so susceptible and obliging,
so kind and attentive."9 Helen would need all these qualities
in the years to come.

In October, Garrison returned to the urgent problem of
saving his paper from complete collapse. The partners were
now printing twenty-three hundred copies of the Liberator
each week, only one quarter of which went to white sub-
scribers, the rest going to editors on the exchange list, public
officials, philanthropic societies, and free Negroes who could
not or would not pay their bills. By 1834 ^e condition of
the paper was growing desperate. Earlier in the year Garri-
son had enlarged the format and acquired six hundred new
subscribers but "under such circumstances as to afford us no
substantial aid: in fact, so remiss have they been up to this
hour, in complying with the terms of our paper, that they

l8l THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

have only increased our difficulties."10 At the end of three
years unpaid subscriptions totaled two thousand dollars.
Allowing seven hundred dollars for the editor's salary (no
princely sum, he assured readers) the Liberator showed an
annual deficit of seventeen hundred dollars.

The partners, casting about for a solution to their financial
problems, proposed a scheme whereby readers could buy
shares in the paper payable to the New England Society
which would then undertake to manage the accounts, but
nothing came of their proposal. Arnold Buffum suggested
that Garrison accept a salary from the society, which hence-
forth should direct the editorial policy of the Liberator,
but Garrison bristled at this threat to his independence. Nor
would he agree to discontinue the paper temporarily, as
Elkur Wright advised, while he canvassed the countryside for
funds. Henry Ware, May's old teacher, saw Garrison's em-
barrassment as an opportunity to put the editor in his place,
and offered the support of Boston philanthropists in exchange
for the power of censorship vested in a board of managers,
"each of whom should, a week at a time, examine all articles
. . . and induce Mr. Garrison to promise to publish nothing
there which should not have been approved by them."11
Ware's plan died quietly, and he himself admitted that he
had been rash in proposing it since "all who know Mr.
Garrison know that he is not a man to be controlled or
advised."

Even Garrison's friends admitted that something must be
done to soften his abusive tone. Elizur Wright complained
of the difficulty of converting otherwise good men "who can
not give up their grudge against Garrison."12 Charles Stuart
told Helen Garrison that the only "jangle of words" he had
ever had with her husband "was when I cautioned him on.
the severity of his language" and asked her to remind Garri-

MOBS AND MARTYRS 183

son "not to forget it."13 Charles Follen, the aggressive Harvard
professor who lost his job by joining the abolitionists, re-
fused to become identified with the party of the Liberator
because he distrusted its editor. Even Garrison's friend and
patron Lewis Tappan admitted that several of his colleagues
disapproved of the Liberator and refused to support it. His
brother Arthur, for one, had become so dissatisfied with
Garrison's policies that he was contemplating a new society
in New England composed exclusively of anti-Garrisonian
moderates.

Still worse was the reluctance of new men to join a society
dominated by the "madman Garrison." Gerrit Smith, the
reformer from New York, balked when Elizur Wright sug-
gested he join the abolitionists and asked whether the Liber-
ator more than any other paper was the favorite mouthpiece
of the anti-slavery societies. Only when assured that the
paper spoke solely for its editor did he agree to support the
abolitionists. James G. Birney, another convert from coloni-
zation, wondered whether the Liberator would prove the
fire ship of the anti-slavery fleet.

Even more ominous was the growing breach between
Garrison and the New England clergy. At Andover Semi-
nary professors warned their students against the imprudences
of the Liberator party. Professor Sidney Willard, Ware's
colleague at the Harvard Divinity School, joined in deploring
Garrison's growing influence, and at Yale Leonard Bacon
used faculty disapproval of the Liberator to strengthen the
colonization forces on campus. In Boston the evangelical
clergy, taking their cue from Beecher, approached Chan-
ning's followers with a plan for forming a society of moder-
ates to "put down" Garrison. In the quiet of his Concord
study Emerson summed up this growing resistance in a

I&f THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

terse complaint. "The Liberator" he noted in his journal,
"is a scold."

Garrison's critics had reason to worry about mounting op-
position to anti-slavery in the North. Amos Phelps was
hardly surprised to learn that as agent of the Massachusetts
Society he was worth a ten-thousand-dollar reward in New
Orleans. But when a Methodist minister was mobbed in the
streets of Worcester in broad daylight and another clergy-
man arrested in Northfield, New Hampshire, as a common
brawler, that was different! All over New England there
were similar signs of growing protest. The president of
Arnherst College demanded the dissolution of the college
anti-slavery society on the grounds that it was "alienating
Christian brethren, retarding and otherwise injuring the
cause of religion in the College, and threatening in many
ways the prosperity of the institution."14 In Washington,
Connecticut, the principal of the local school was fired and
driven out of town for expressing abolitionist opinions;
and in New Canaan, New Hampshire, an experiment in
biracial education at Northfield Academy ended abruptly
when the townspeople hitched a hundred yoke of oxen to
the school and dragged it off into a nearby swamp. Emerson
and Horace Mann were hooted when they tried to speak on
the subject of slavery. Whittier was roughly handled in
Garrison's home town. Charles Burleigh, a recent addition
to Garrison's staff, was mobbed in Mansfield, Massachusetts.
To many of these men it seemed that as the clarion of anti-
slavery the Liberator was not an asset but a liability and that
the cause of their troubles lay in Garrison's intemperate and
abusive language.

Garrison fought boldly for his editorial freedom. The hue
and cry against his paper, he insisted, was itself a sign of
progress. Four years ago there had not been so much as a

MOBS AND MARTYRS 185

peep or a mutter on the slavery question in the whole
country. Now the subject was on every tongue.

Within four years, I have seen my principles embraced cordially
and unalterably, by thousands of the best men in the nation. If
God has made me a signal instrument in the accomplishment of
this astonishing change, it is not for me to glory, but to be thank-
ful. What else but the Liberator primarily, (and of course instru-
mentally,) has effected this change? Greater success than I have
had, no man could reasonably desire, or humbly expect. Greater
success no man could obtain, peradventure without endangering
his reliance upon an almighty arm.15

Once again vanity obscured the truth: neither the New
York abolitionists nor Weld's followers in the West un-
reservedly accepted the Garrisonian formula of immediate
emancipation. The New York Society still felt it necessary
to modify his phrase to "immediate emancipation, gradually
accomplished." Weld and the Westerners, puzzled by the
semantics of their New York brethren, inverted their motto
to "gradual emancipation, immediately begun." All the aboli-
tionists agreed with Garrison that slavery must be wiped
out as soon as possible, but no one knew exactly what his
formula meant. Nowhere outside his own bailiwick in New
England was his notion of immediate emancipation unquali-
fiedly accepted. His flat assertion to the contrary convinced
no one but himself.

Scarcely more convincing was his argument that language
was, after all, a matter of taste — "and where is the standard
of taste?" Though he admitted that his words were not
always happily chosen, he explained that as an editor he
necessarily wrote in great haste and could not remodel
and criticize as he liked. Lest his critics seize on this as an
admission of guilt, however, he proceeded to make a distinc-

1 86 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

tion between principles and language only to flout it with
triumphant illogicality by proving that the "fallacy" of the
moderates sprang from their erroneous principles.

When he examined the reaction of the American public to
anti-slavery, he was on firm ground once again. What single
abolitionist, he asked, had escaped the wrath of the people?
"Are not all their names cast out as evil? Are they not all
branded as fanatics, disorganizes and madmen?" Whittier's
quiet manner did not protect him, nor did Beriah Green's
vigorous tone make him popular. Phelps, Foilen, Goodell,
Birney, — all with styles superior, no doubt, to his own —
were as cordially despised as he was. "Why are they thus
maltreated and calumniated? Certainly not for the phrase-
ology which they use, but for the principles which they
adopted." The truth was — and here Garrison reached the
heart of the issue — that an anti-slavery minority had col-
lided with the conservative instinct of an American society
determined to ignore the moral question of slavery. But he
went further — he accused Northern businessmen and South-
ern slaveholders of conniving to destroy American freedom
and plunge the country into barbarism. Both had a vested
interest in corruption, and to protect this interest they were
willing to proscribe and persecute. Against their dark con-
spiracy the abolitionists stood almost alone. "It is true, not
many mighty have as yet been called to this sacred strife,"
he wrote to Channing. "Like every other great reform, it
has been commenced by obscure and ignorant men. It is
God's mode commonly, to choose the foolish things of the
world to confound the wise; because his foolishness is wiser
than men, and his weakness stronger than men." Like a tree
planted by the water, the Saints would not be moved.

Ten years earlier Garrison's naive conspiracy theory of
history would have been discarded as the absurdity it was.

MOBS AND MARTYRS 187

But in 1834 events in the North and the South were combin-
ing to give his convenient oversimplification the appearance
of fact. Southern intellectuals were perfecting their theory
of reactionary paternalism that utterly repudiated civil liber-
ties. With its new "positive good" weapon the South was
preparing an offensive against its critics which succeeded
in silencing them at the cost of free institutions. Once ap-
prised of the abolitionists' intentions Southern legislators
reacted with near unanimity. Three years after the founding
of the American Anti-Slavery Society every Southern state
had passed laws prohibiting the organization of anti-slavery
societies within their borders and preventing the dissemination
of abolitionist literature. Even more effective than laws in
securing uniformity were the vigilance committees, groups
of prominent citizens in Southern communities entrusted with
the execution of "justice" on those foolish enough to doubt
the wisdom of slavery. These committees saw to it that local
mails stayed closed to anti-slavery literature and that state
laws prohibiting debate on slavery were duly enforced. By
interrogating travelers and inspecting their baggage, by
aiding local postmasters and offering rewards for the ap-
prehension of notorious abolitionists like Garrison and Arthur
Tappan they soon perfected all the inquisitorial techniques
of a reign of terror. Typical of their efficiency was the
work of the vigilance committee in Nashville, Tennessee,
in 1835 *** punishing Amos Dresser, a student from Lane
Theological Seminary unlucky enough to be caught with a
parcel of Bibles wrapped in a copy of the Emancipator.
Although Tennessee had not yet passed a law under which
Dresser could be prosecuted, the Committee solved the
problem by confiscating his belongings, administering twenty
lashes in the public square, and driving him out of town.
Not content with vigilance at home, Southern legislatures

1 88 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

mounted an attack on the right of petition and bombarded
Northern states with demands for action against abolitionist
publishers. To the abolitionists' dismay their demands drew
a sympathetic response from Northern legislatures. Only
Pennsylvania and Ohio flatly denied the constitutionality
of such controls. Bills to regulate anti-slavery publications
were introduced in Maine, New Hampshire, and Connecti-
cut. In Rhode Island a similar measure passed through com-
mittee and was killed only by the efforts of the Republican
Thomas Dorr. Governor Marcy of New York promised to
use his upstate strength to bring the wild-eyed abolitionists
in the city into line. And in Massachusetts Garrison soon
found himself in mortal struggle with Governor Everett's
conservative Whigs, who dominated the legislature and were
determined to destroy him.

It was the reaction of the Northern public that most
disturbed the abolitionists. Everywhere there seemed to be
an agreement on the need to suppress anti-slavery, a view
which the Northern business community and the conservative
press manipulated all too easily. In Cincinnati James Birney,
who had abandoned colonization and was now a militant
abolitionist, set up his Philanthropist press only to have his
printing office torn apart and his home methodically wrecked.
His courage and persistence increased the hatred of his fel-
low townsmen until, plagued by lawsuits and hounded by
pro-slavery mobs, he left for New York to become the
secretary of the national society. When James Thome, one of
Weld's band, attempted to lecture in Granville, Ohio, citizens
of the town drove him off and burned the schoolhouse where
he was to speak. The indefatigable Amos Dresser was mobbed
in Marblehead, Massachusetts, less than a year after his
experience in Nashville. Utica, New York, made lecturing
a distinct hazard for the abolitionists, and from Weld came

MOBS AND MARTYRS 189

periodic reports of violence in the West. Lecturing in the
Presbyterian Church in the village of CirclevHle, Ohio, he
was struck on the temple by a rock. While he sat down to
clear his head, the audience hung cloaks and coats over the
windows, and he managed to finish his talk. The next night
the church was closed and he had to deliver his lecture in an
abandoned storeroom while a mob outside pelted the shutters
with rocks. Not far away in Berlin, Ohio, Marius Robinson
was dragged out in the middle of the night, stripped, tarred
and feathered, and driven into the woods.

For the most part undaunted, the abolitionists kept right
on lecturing. John W. Alvord, another of Weld's "joyous
warriors," kept up his spirits by retailing humorous accounts
of the vicissitudes of his calling. "Last night Midd[l]ebury
puked," he reported to Weld on one occasion. "Her stomach
had evidently been overloaded. . . . Spasmodic heavings and
wretchings were manifest during the whole day. Toward
night symptoms more alarming." Warned off by the town
fathers, Alvord and Thome insisted on holding their meet-
ing.

All still until about 8 [o'clock] when in came a broadside of
Eggs, Glass, Egg shells, white and yolks flew on every side. Br.
Thom[e's] Fact Book received an egg just in its bowels and I
doubt whether one in the house escaped a spattering. I have been
trying to clean off this morning, but cant get off the stink. Thome
dodged like a stoned gander. He brought up at length against
the side of the desk, cocked his eye and stood gazing upward at
the flying missiles as they stream [e]d in ropy masses through
the house. ... He apologizes to me this morning by saying he
thought the stove was crackin! ! ! ! ie

Eggs were one thing, the organized savagery of city mobs
another. The climax to this early outbreak of violence came

190 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

in the summer of 1835 ^n New York, when, in a sudden
burst of race hatred mobs roamed the streets breaking up
a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, sacking
Lewis Tappan's house, and invading the Negro section and
methodically wrecking three churches, a school, and twenty
homes.

Thus James Birney hardly exaggerated when he warned
that the antagonist principles of liberty and slavery had been
roused into action and only one could be victorious. Garri-
son turned his warning into a denunciation of the South.
"And what has brought our country to the verge of ruin.

, . . THE ACCURSED SYSTEM OF SLAVERY! To SUStain that

system, there is a general willingness to destroy LIBERTY OF
SPEECH and of the PRESS, and to mob or murder all who op-
pose it. In the popular fury against the advocates of a bleed-
ing humanity, every principle of justice, every axiom of
liberty, every feeling of humanity — all the fundamental
axioms of republican government are derided and violated
with fatal success."17 This histrionic identification of civil
rights and the anti-slavery cause was to prove the most
effective weapon in the Garrisonian arsenal, an argument
which eventually turned back the pro-slavery assault on free
society. In presenting the anti-slavery minority as the victims
of a demonic slave power and, above all, by posing as their
chief martyr, he dramatized the fundamental issues of free-
dom and won the grudging support of a number of Northern
moderates who finally recognized the Southern threat to
free institutions.

The first of Garrison's martyrs was Prudence Crandall, a
fragile, birdlike zealot from Canterbury, Connecticut, who
marched into the office of the Liberator in January, 1833.
Two years before, she had bought a rambling house on the
Canterbury green and opened a boarding school for young

MOBS AND MARTYRS 19 1

ladies. Her school prospered until she enrolled a young
colored girl, whereupon the offended townspeople resolved
to protect white womanhood by boycotting the school. Miss
Crandall was ready to abandon her experiment in bkacial
education when she happened to read one of Garrison's edi-
torials proposing a manual labor college for Negroes, which
gave her the idea of opening her school to colored girls ex-
clusively. She wrote to Garrison telling him of her plan and
requesting an interview. "I do not dare tell any one of my
neighbors about the contemplated change in my school,"
she added, "and I beg of you, sir, that you will not expose
it to any one; for if it was known, I have no reason to doubt
but it would ruin my present school."18 Ten days later she
appeared in Boston to discuss with him the best means of
finding pupils. Garrison was convinced that the scheme
was practicable, and on March 2, 1833, the Liberator carried
the announcement that Miss Crandall was now accepting
applications for her new school. The notice was accompanied
by the editor's imprimatur assuring readers of his "pleasurable
emotion" in contemplating the success of the venture and of
his entire confidence in Miss Crandall. News of the proposed
school was already abroad, however, and by the time Garri-
son sailed for England Miss Crandall was deep in trouble with
the citizens of Canterbury incensed at the prospect of a
"nigger school" on their doorstep.

A little opposition was all that the abolitionists needed to
turn the affair into an anti-slavery came celebre. Arnold
Buffum was dispatched by the New England Society to
argue Miss Crandall's case in a Canterbury town meeting.
Samuel May offered his services, and the Benson brothers
hurried over from Providence. From New York came word
that Arthur Tappan stood ready to meet all expenses. Mean-
while fifteen or twenty colored girls were recruited from

192 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Providence, Boston, and New Haven, and classes at the
school began. Then the townspeople discovered an old va-
grancy law on the books and threatened to enforce it. Canter-
bury rallied in protest against Miss Crandall's experiment;
grocers refused to sell to the school, doctors declined to
attend the students, and town loafers added their bit by
molesting Miss Crandall and the girls. Andrew Judson, the
spokesman for the town, rushed up to Hartford, where he
found a majority of the legislature willing to pass a law pro-
hibiting the establishment of schools for out-of-state students
without permission of the local authorities. Although the
law was a clear violation of constitutional rights, it served its
purpose. The school was closed, Miss Crandall arraigned,
and her trial set for August. After a single night in jail spent
in the cell of a recently convicted murderer she emerged
to learn that overnight she had become the heroine of the
anti-slavery movement. At the trial the jury was unable to
reach a verdict, but a few weeks later a second jury convicted
her on. the charges of accepting nonresident pupils and teach-
ing them. The case was appealed to the state supreme court,
where about a year later the decision of the trial court was
reversed on grounds of insufficient evidence. After twelve
months of costly litigation Miss Crandall had won her case
but lost her school: her fellow townsmen celebrated their
legal defeat by breaking the windows of the school, filling
the well with manure, and decorating the fence with dead
cats. In the summer of 1834 Miss Crandall gave up the
school, married a Baptist clergyman and moved West.

At first Garrison was impressed with the tenacity of the
Quaker schoolmistress. "She is a wonderful woman," he
wrote to Knapp, "as undaunted as if she had the whole
world on her side."19 He ordered Knapp and Johnson in his
absence in England to make full use of her case, and when,

MOBS AND MARTYRS 193

just as he sailed, Canterbury committed its "outrageous
crime," he urged them to make a prompt defense. "If we
suffer the school to be put down in Canterbury, other places
will partake of the panic, and also prevent its introduction
in their vicinity. We may as well, 'first as last,' meet this
proscriptive spirit and conquer it."20 When he returned from
England, however, the Canterbury cause was already lost
and circumstances had changed. In the first place, Miss
Crandall was not a reserved maiden lady but a spirited com-
batant who could trade epithets with the best of her op-
ponents. With her own newspaper, the Unionist, she had
conducted an able defense and given every indication of
thoroughly enjoying her fame. Garrison noted that she was
in danger of becoming "exalted above measure," in other
words, a nuisance. He announced that her usefulness to
the cause had ended and that though abolitionists should
continue to "make the facts of this single case tingle in the
ears of the people," it was best for Miss Crandall herself
to move off "with flying colors" and leave him to cash in
the depreciated currency of her reputation.21

To replace the chastened Miss Crandall as the star witness
to the perfidy of New England he brought over the English
agitator George Thompson in the fall of 1834. The two
men had first met the previous year and struck up an im-
mediate and deep friendship. A year older than Garrison,
Thompson had risen in the English anti-slavery ranks only
after years of adversity following a moral lapse that nearly
ruined his Hfe. Some years before, he had stolen a sum of
money from his employer and been caught red-handed. He
readily confessed his crime, and in exchange for a promise
not to prosecute had finally made good the entire amount.
Yet he was still paying for his mistake — despite his subse-
quent impeccable behavior and his services to the anti-

194 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

slavery cause he was dogged by the story of his crime and
new charges of misappropriation of abolitionist funds. Tem-
peramentally he and Garrison were much alike. Both were
self-made men driven by ambition; both tried to compensate
for their unpopularity at home by seeking honor abroad.
Thompson had a tall stately carriage and a formal manner
to match. Where Garrison achieved at best only a blunt
forcefulness on the platform, Thompson's resonant elo-
quence spun a kind of poetry of denunciation.

"He comes not as a foreigner but as £a man and a brother,'
feeling for those in bonds as bound with them/' Thus Garri-
son announced Thompson's arrival in Boston. For all his
charm and dedication to the cause Thompson, something less
than a success in England, proved a distinct liability in
America. He received a sample of the reception awaiting him
in the United States when he stepped off the boat to learn
that the proprietors of New York's Atlantic Hotel had
canceled his reservations upon hearing of his anti-slavery
designs. It was a measure of Garrison's reckless disregard
of public opinion that in the midst of his own struggles with
a hostile clergy he asked Thompson to bring the weight of
English evangelicalism directly to bear on his New England
cousins. Thompson arrived in Boston to find a conservative
religious opposition preparing to deal with the Liberator and
its editor once and for all.

The idea of an anti-slavery society composed of men of
moderation and good sense proceeded from the fertile brain
of Lyman Beecher. More than anything else Beecher feared
disunion in church and society, and as he surveyed the
work of the anti-slavery men in the year 1834, he was not
encouraged by what he saw. The silken ties, those soft but
mighty bands of love that united Christians in the North
and South, were beginning to snap. Beecher had no trouble

MOBS AND MARTYRS 195

identifying the Atropos of the reform movement whose
invective slashed the American lifeline. If Garrison were
allowed to continue, he warned, abolitionism would not
last two years. Something must be done immediately. Beecher
spent the year 1834 as the first president of Lane Seminary
trying to tame the reform impulses of his students and direct
them into socially acceptable channels. For his pains he
received nothing but their well-deserved rebukes. Led by
Weld, the seminarians refused to be bridled and capped
their series of protests by leaving the school. Back in Boston,
Beecher's followers, heartened by premature reports of the
master's success, went forward with their plans for a society
based on "benevolent and enlarged feeling" whose first task
would be to "put down" Garrison.

The American Union for the Relief and Improvement of
the Colored Race — that "soulless organization with a sound-
ing title," as Garrison dubbed it — was nearly stillborn. The
handful of clergymen who met in Tremont Hall on January
14, 1835, were confronted with their archenemy accompanied
by George Thompson and the rest of the Garrisonians who
demanded to know the purpose of the new society. Receiving
no answer and requested to leave, they opened a filibuster
instead, whereupon Thompson was declared out of order
and then "impertinent." The intruders next asked whether
the American Union was to be open to "all friends of anti-
slavery," as the first call had declared, or merely to those who
"believe a new organization is necessary," as a subsequent
announcement proclaimed. Once again they were asked to
leave, which they finally did after hearing the ministers vote
that slavery was not a sin and that the American Union con-
templated "no designs of hostility in respect to any other
institution." The abolitionists knew differently.

Garrison was correct in ascribing a sectarian spirit to the

196 THE LIBERATOR: "WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

American Union. The new society was dominated by the
Congregational clergy who still found it difficult to work
harmoniously with their more enlightened Unitarian brethren.
The whole scheme might have collapsed had it not been
for the arrival from New York of Arthur Tappan, bent on
using the American Union to bring Garrison to reason. After
meetings with both parties Tappan wrote an open letter to
the Boston Recorder giving his blessing to the American
Union but defending Garrison from the charge of atheism.
No man, he pointed out, could be blind to Garrison's obvious
faults, chief among which was "the severe and denunciatory
language with which he often assails his opponents and
repels their attacks," but these shortcomings need not ob-
scure his "noble and disinterested efforts."22 There was room
in the movement for all good men: those who found it im-
possible to work with Garrison should strike out for them-
selves.

Lewis Tappan, in whom the milk of human kindness was
slowly curdling, sensed the true purpose of the American
Union from the beginning. He disapproved of Arthur's indul-
gent view of the new society and did not hesitate to assure
Garrison of his continued support. "I have attentively read
your remarks on the proceedings of the late convention in
Boston," he wrote to Garrison, "to form what I should call
AN ANTI-GARRISON SOCIETY, and, for one, I heartily approve
them. They will meet with a hearty response from every
true hearted emancipationist in the land. The times require
decision and courage, and I feel thankful to God for your
steadfastness at the post which providence has assigned you.
Go on and prosper, thou friend of the oppressed! The Lord
will be thy shield and buckler."23 Without waiting for per-
mission Garrison printed the letter, while Lewis quickly won
back his brother's support for the Liberator. Arthur with-

MOBS AND MARTYRS 197

drew to a position of benevolent neutrality and meanwhile
resumed his aid to the Garrison party. Back in favor with
the president of the national society, Garrison opened fire
on the American Union, which under his heavy salvos slowly
sank into oblivion. The first threat to his hegemony in New
England had ended.

The appearance of the American Union shattered Garri-
son's dream of leading a united church into the anti-slavery
camp. He had always believed that abolition should be the
work of the American churches, but here in Boston, the
birthplace of American Protestantism, religious leaders were
transgressing and lying against the Lord by refusing to de-
nounce slavery. American Christianity had become a pillar
of slavery, and ministers no longer preached the true word
of God. From now on the drift of his thought toward anti-
clericalism was unmistakable as his obsession with conscience
scattered before it questions of doctrine and polity. "To
learn my duty," he warned his readers, "I will not consult any
other statute-book than THE BIBLE: and whatever requirement
of man I believe is opposed to the spirit of the gospel, I will
at all hazards disobey."24 Moral right, he declared, was ever
paramount to legal right and should freely interrogate it. With
George Thompson as his chief examiner he now took up the
work of moral interrogation with renewed vigor.

At Freedom's Cottage the two men planned Thompson's
itinerary for the summer of 1835, beginning with a tour
of Maine and New Hampshire. Thompson found it rough
going. In Augusta a mob smashed the windows of his hotel
room and a committee of leading citizens urged his hasty
departure. In Concord his meeting with the ladies' auxiliary
ended precipitately in a shower of brickbats; and in Lowell
a hail of refuse stopped the proceedings. Everywhere he
went he was denounced as an itinerant "stirrer-up of strife"

1^8 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

and an agent of "foreign interference." A man less sure of
himself might well have admitted the unpalatable truth that
Americans simply did not take to George Thompson, but
Garrison, convinced of his visitor's curative powers, simply
doubled the dosage. The disastrous tour dragged through the
hot summer.

Elsewhere the national society was stepping up its offen-
sive. In June the Executive Committee hit upon a new
scheme for printing and distributing thousands of pamphlets
and tracts. Then a circular went out to all its members
calling for thirty thousand dollars to finance new periodicals
and pay new agents. Until now most Northerners had looked
upon the society as a collection of cranks and misguided
meddlers well supplied with visions but lacking the common
sense to effect any of their wild schemes. Two years had seen
this unconcern give way to a real anxiety; and the announce-
ment of a program designed to bring the anti-slavery message
into every town and hamlet in the country roused the
Northern public to action. Already there were mobs and
riots aimed at the innocent free Negro. In Philadelphia gangs
of toughs roamed the streets destroying Negro property
and threatening the victims. In Utica rioters drove the dele-
gates to a state anti-slavery convention out of town under
a shower of mud and stones, and as soon as they were gone
wrecked the offices of the city's abolitionist newspaper. In
Hartford there were persistent rumors that a Negro church
had been burned to the ground with the congregation locked
inside it. Garrison thought he saw in these riots an "infallible
sign" that Satan's time was short, "When tyrants increase
the weight of the bondsmen's fetters, and threatens [sic]
extermination to all who shall dare question their rights
... it is pretty certain that they deem the hour of emanci-
pation to be close at hand."25 His followers who studied the

MOBS AND MARTYRS 199

explosive situation right in Boston more carefully did not
share his optimism.

In July he sailed for Nova Scotia and a month's rest,
leaving Thompson in the capable hands of Samuel May. He
returned to find the city ablaze with anti-abolitionism.
Negroes on "Nigger Hill" were being harassed by bands of
thugs who turned out nightly to loot their homes and drive
them off the street. The press was busy whipping up hatred
for Thompson as the "paid agent" of the enemies of "republi-
can institutions." In August,, John Quincy Adams, back home
between sessions of Congress, noted that a public meeting
to silence the abolitionists was being planned and remarked
acidly that "the disease is deeper than can be healed by town
meeting resolutions." On Friday afternoon, August 21, Faneuil
Hall was filled to capacity by Bostonians who came to hear
Harrison Gray Otis argue the need to keep the abolitionists
from scattering firebrands, arrows, and death.

Garrison considered attending the Faneuil Hall meeting to
refute the charges against him, but at the last minute he was
dissuaded from making what could only have been a danger-
ous gesture. Instead he took recourse to the columns of the
Liberator. Linking the Faneuil Hall demonstration with the
"popular fury" in the South, he lashed out at the "utter
degeneracy'7 of Boston. How, he asked, had the abolitionists
behaved" under such provocation? "Have they, in a single
instance, returned evil for evil? Who among them all, has
given blow for blow? or who has girded on his sword, or
who has recommended an appeal to force? m® He identified
the source of this new prescriptive spirit as the "sinful preju-
dices in the high and educated classes." "Those classes do not
compctse the active portion of the mobs, but they do the pas-
sive, and thai poition is the most numerous, and m our opinion
the most: to blame."21 For tke time being, however, k seemed

200 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

better not to offer further provocation. Leaving his brother-
in-law Henry Benson in charge of the paper, he spent
September at the Benson farm in Brooklyn, partly to regain
his health, which had broken down under the strain of
Thompson's visit, and partly to avoid trouble. "There is yet
too much fever, and too little rationality, in the public
mind . . ." he wrote to Benson, "for . . . any of us to make
addresses to the patient without having him attempt to knock
us down. Write — print — distribute — this we may do with
profit to our cause."28 If he thought that the storm had
blown over, he was quickly disillusioned on his return to the
city. A few days earlier enterprising citizens had erected a
gallows in front of his house and were now eagerly awaiting
his arrival. Then they learned of a meeting of the Boston
Female Anti-Slavery Society scheduled in Julien Hall at
which George Thompson would speak.

Two facts are clear concerning the "Garrison mob" of
October 21, 1835: it was instigated by the Boston press, and
Garrison was not its intended victim. All during the summer
the Boston Atlas and the Gazette had called for resistance to
the "impudent bullying" of George Thompson, "not from
the rabble, but from men of property and standing, who
have a large stake in the community." A week before the
riot Buckingham's Courier, which had defended Garrison in
the past, joined the standing order in denouncing the English-
man as a "vagabond" and a "scoundrel" hired by the aboli-
tionists to spread race hatred. On October 14 the anniversary
meeting of the ladies' society was postponed for want of a
hall, the proprietors of Julien Hall having withdrawn their
permission. It took more than the timidity of property owners
to stop Boston's intrepid feminists, led by Mary Parker,
Theodore's iron-willed sister. They promptly arranged an-

MOBS AND MARTYRS 2OI

other meeting for the twenty-first at the society's rooms at
46 Washington Street.

By noon of that day five hundred handbills fresh from
the printer's were circulating in State Street and in the
hotels and business houses of the city.

THOMPSON
THE ABOLITIONIST! ! ! !

That infamous foreign scoundrel THOMPSON will
hold forth this afternoon, at the Liberator Office,
No. 48 Washington Street. The present is a fair
opportunity for the friends of the Union to snake
Thompson out! It will be a contest between the
Abolitionists and the friends of the Union. A purse
of $100 has been raised by a number of patriotic
citizens to reward the individual who shall first lay
violent hands on Thompson, so that he may be
brought to the tar-kettle before dark. Friends of
the Union, be vigilant!

Boston, Wednesday, 12 o'clock.

The handbill had been designed that morning at the office
of the Gazette by two merchants, Isaac Stevens and Isaac
Means, both of whom had signed the call for the Faneuil
Hall meeting. To make sure of a mob sufficient for their
purposes they sent one hundred of the handbills to the North
End, where Irish mechanics could be counted on to treat
the Englishman as fair game.

Promptly at two-thirty Garrison arrived at the Washington
Street office, where he discovered over a hundred men mill-
ing about outside the building and an equal number lining
the stairway to the hall on the third floor. Pushing his way
through the crowd, which offered threats but no violence, he
took his seat with the twenty-five ladies who comprised the

2O2 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM UjQYD GARRISON

Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. When he saw that his
visitors showed no disposition to leave, he tried a bit of
sarcasm. "If gentlemen, any of you are ladies — in disguise
— why, only apprise me of the fact, give me your name,
and I will introduce you to the rest of your sex, and you
can take seats among them accordingly." This shaft wounded
only the sensibilities of the Boston matrons — the crowd
pressed forward calling for Thompson. Suddenly realizing
that as the only man at the meeting (Thompson never showed
up) he might well be chosen to fill the speaker's shoes, he
retired behind the partition which separated the hall from
the offices. Here he found Charles C. Burleigh, die Connecti-
cut abolitionist and friend of Prudence Crandall, and together
they sat calmly waiting for the mob to disperse. Meanwhile
the ladies opened their meeting with a prayer.

Suddenly Mayor Theodore Lyman arrived, posted a hand-
ful of officers in the doorway, and mounted the stairs. Once
inside the hall filled with shouting men, he tried to tell
them that Thompson was not even in the city, but matters
had already gone too far. The opening prayer was punctuated
by fists banging on the door of the partition behind which
Garrison sat writing an account of the "awful, sublime, and
soul thrilling scene" which he could not see. Mayor Lyman
turned to the members: "Go home, ladies," he pleaded, "go
home,"

PRESIDENT [Miss Parker] : What renders it necessary

we should go home?
MR. LYMAN; I am the mayor of the city, and I

cannot now explain; but will call on you this

evening.
PRESIDENT: If the ladies will be seated, we will take

the sense of the meeting.
MR. LYMAN: Don't stop, ladies, go home.

MOBS AKD MARTYRS

The sense of the meeting seemed to be that it would be
wise to take the mayor's advice. The meeting was adpurned,
and led by their doughty president, the ladies filed out "amid
manifestations of revengeful brutaKty."

With the women gone and Thompson obviously nowhere
on the premises, the mob began to shout for Garrison and
meanwhile amused itself by tearing down the anti-slavery sign
outside* As Burleigh strolled nonchalantly out of the office
Lyman rushed in and ordered Garrison to leave by a back
window which opened into a narrow lane. While the mob
blockaded the front entrance, Garrison slipped out of the
window,, across the narrow way and into a carpenter shop
where he climbed into the loft and hid behind a pile of
lumber. But he had been spotted. Shouting "Lynch him!" and
"Out with him!" the crowd poured into the shop and up the
ladder. "On seeing me," Garrison recalled, "three or four
of the rioters, uttering a yell, furiously dragged me to the
window, with the intention of hurling me from that height
to the ground; but one of them relented and said — 'Don't
let us kill him outright.' So they drew me back, and coiled a
rope about my body — probably to drag me through the
streets." He made the best of his ridiculous posture. Bowing
konicaJHy from the loft to the men below, he begged their
indulgence until he could back down the ladder. Once ou the
ground he was seized by three pairs of friendly arms and
hustled out into State Street and up to the rear of the City
Hall.

Here trouble began. Whatever its intentions up to this
point — Garrison believed that he was headed for the Com-
mon and a coat of tar — the mob realized that once inside
City Hall he was safe. In a rush on the doorway the rioters
tried to snatch him and were beaten back by the police only
after they had ripped the dothes off his back. Garrison re-

204 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

mained serene throughout, perhaps because he had lost his
glasses and could not see three feet in front of him. Later
he told friends that he felt "perfectly calm, nay very happy. . . .
It seemed to me that it was indeed a blessed privilege to
suffer in the cause of Christ." Mayor Lyman and his deputies,
less sure of divine interposition than their captive, decided
to whisk him off to the Leverett Street jail and lock him up
for safekeeping on the trumped-up charge of disturbing the
peace. Once again he was bustled out into the street, this
time to a waiting carriage. While the police officers beat off
attackers, the driver plied his whip and the hack careened
out of State Street and into Bowdoin Square headed for the
jail. Within an hour the mob had disappeared.

Garrison spent the evening behind bars in a suit of bor-
rowed clothes chatting with the jailer and receiving his
friends. In the morning he re-enacted the ritual of the jail
by inscribing on the walls of the cell a message to posterity.
That afternoon he was released on condition that he leave
the city. The same evening, accompanied by Helen, he left
for Brooklyn.

From the Benson farm he sent orders to Burleigh and
Knapp to publish accounts of the riot, and within a few days
his own version appeared. When the Boston papers obliged
by blaming the abolitionists for the outburst, charges and
countercharges filled the press for weeks to come. Fanned
by regular blasts from the Liberator, the affair smoldered
throughout the winter.

Among his friends and followers Garrison's stock rose to
new heights. They marveled at his courage. "Joy to thee,
Son of Trial!" exclaimed an unidentified admirer whose
sonnet graced the columns of the Liberator. Knapp thanked
God for his partner's preservation "from the fury of a mis-
guided and ferocious mob." Samuel Sewall congratulated

MOBS AND MARTYRS

him on his escape, but he added that he did not believe
the mob at any time meant to murder him. Maria Chapman
thought otherwise. One of the doughty Weston sisters, she
had married the abolitionist merchant Henry Chapman and
become the guiding spirit of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery
Society. It was she who led her companions "each with a
colored friend" through the mob to her home. Now she
praised Garrison for his coolness and bravery in the face
of peril. But there were also rumors of his cowardice, of his
begging for mercy on his knees, and of his precipitate flight
from the city. Harriet Martineau, visiting Boston at this
time and meeting Garrison on his return, thought she de-
tected a "want of manliness" and an "excessive agitation"
in him. By this time Garrison, who was enjoying his martyr-
dom, no doubt had embellished the facts to improve the
drama. Burleigh, his companion for all but a few minutes of
that afternoon, testified to his complete composure; and
Mayor Lyman remembered that he had greeted him with a
smile. However exaggerated his own accounts of behavior
may have been, there is no reason to doubt that he followed
his nonresistance precepts by refusing to escape or defend
himself.29

It was Harriet Martineau who coined the phrase "Martyr
Age" to describe Garrison's treatment by the Boston mob.
He thought the phrase "reign of terror" more appropriate.
"A cloud of infamy — a thunder-cloud of heaven's venge-
ance—a cloud of darkness and terror, covers the nation
like a mighty pall," he wrote three weeks after the affair.
"Rebellious, ungrateful and blood-thirsty land! how art
thou fallen even to the lowest depths of degradation and
sin."30 It remained for a later generation to put the Boston
mob in proper perspective. John Jay Chapman suggested the
need for distinguishing between a "reign of terror" and

206 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

"persecution." "The unpleasantnesses and injustices to which
the Abolitionists were subjected," Chapman wrote, "never
justified a literal application of the terms 'martyr/ ^reign
of terror/ etc.; but the word 'persecution' is most aptly used
to describe their sufferings, if we reflect that there are perse-
cutions which do not result in death."31 Prudence Crandall's
discomfort at the hands of the people of Canterbury hardly
qualified her as a martyr, nor were Birney's experiences in
Cincinnati or Weld's treatment in the villages of Ohio part
of a concerted reign of terror. The buffeting Garrison re-
ceived from Irish workmen in State Street could hardly
compare with Elijah Lovejoy's tragic defense of his press
two years later in Alton, Illinois. But democratic society
does not always resort to the coil of rope and the flaming
cross to discourage unpopular opinions. Often a few well-
aimed stones or a handful of efficient hecklers are more than
enough. Almost all of the anti-abolitionist episodes had their
antic aspects and their lunatic participants. Beneath the sur-
face comedy, however, there lay in the silent hostility of the
many and the compulsive hates of the few a major threat
to free institutions. The Garrison mob was not simply a col-
lection of pranksters; it was an irrational force capable of
destroying democracy. It was the abolitionists' success in
touching the consciences of their fellow citizens that ulti-
mately saved them.

Hie Garrison mob brought about such an awakening of
conscience in Boston. "Happily one point seems already to
be gaining universal assent," the merchant Francis Jackson
wrote to Samuel May in November, 1835, "that slavery
cannot long survive free discussion. ... As slavery cannot
exist with free discussion — so neither can liberty breathe
without it. Losing this, we too shall be no longer free men
indeed, but little if at all superior to the millions we now

MOBS A3*D MARTYRS 2OJ

seek to emancipate." Other men of property and standing
in Boston were coming to the same conclusion. They had been
made to see that however obstinate and shortsighted the
abolitionists might be, their cause was inextricably woven
into the fabric of free society. From his new law office in
Court Street, Wendell Phillips, the young Boston patrician,
looked down on the mob dragging Garrison through the
streets and resolved then and there to join his cause. The
twenty-four-year-old Phillips was the wealthy son of Bos-
ton's first mayor and a graduate of Harvard, where he had
hobnobbed with the sons of Southern planters and joined
all the best clubs. Tall, slim, with a ruddy complexion,
Grecian features and wavy blond hair combed back over his
high forehead, he was the picture of studied negligence,
Boston's ideal of the aristocrat. At Harvard he had studied
rhetoric with the famed Edward Channing, who taught him
to hate purple prose and rely on the natural power of hs
magnificent voice and muscular mind. Along with money
Phillips had inherited a strong social conscience, and it was
this combination of wealth and moral commitment that
drove him to play the patrician agitator, the reformer who
could afford to throw himself into an unpopular cause and
casually dismiss his notoriety. His acquisition was a godsend
to Garrison. Serving his chief with loyalty and devotion until
the very outbreak of war, he brought with him an energy
and drive, a talent for agitation, and a voice that made him
the greatest of the anti-slavery orators.

Henry Bowditch and George B. Emerson, sons of old
families and beneficiaries of Boston's Golden Age, came
over to anti-slavery. Even William Ellery Channing, finally
convinced that he should speak out, hurried his Thoughts on
Slavery into print. A plain Connecticut farmer, Henry C.
Wright, who became Garrison's most devoted disciple, made

2O8 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

his anti-slavery debut in a series of letters to the Liberator
indicting the city officials and the business community.
Orson Murray in Vermont and Nathaniel Rogers in New
Hampshire promised to spread immediate emancipation in
their states.

These new men represented different types of the New
England character — the cultured Bostonian of old family
whose conscience overthrew his sense of class, and the in-
dependent son of yeoman stock whose militant Protestantism
drove him to abolition as the first step in the millennial ex-
periment. But not even Garrison could unite Boston and the
backwoods. The events of the next few years disclosed
a rift in Garrisonism which piety and unction could not
heal.

All this lay in the future. From the aftermath of the
Boston riot there emerged a new attitude in New England
which eventually created a Northern mind. Although there
would be no more Garrison mobs, the conviction that slavery
threatened democracy was not widely held in 1835, and in
this sense Garrison's work was just beginning. But now he
had new recruits who realized better than he that the anti-
slavery cause transcended the personality of its leader.

10
"Our Doom as a Nation Is Sealed"

IN THE QUIET OF the Benson farmhouse, where he and his
wife retired after his encounter with the Boston mob,
Garrison took time to reflect on the progress of moral reform.
"Much as my mind is absorbed in the anti-slavery cause,"
he confessed to his sister-in-law Anna, "there are other great
subjects that frequently occupy my thoughts, upon which
much light remains to be thrown, and which are of the
utmost importance to the temporal and eternal welfare
of man."1 The peace cause, the status of women, the Sab-
bath question, temperance, home missions — all of these proj-
ects he had flung aside for the hectic work of organizing
abolition in New England. It was time to pick up the loose
threads once more in the hope of making a pattern of Chris-
tian reform. Of all his interests the nonresistance cause seemed
most important now. His pacifist beliefs had been on trial
that day in October as he stumbled along State Street towed
by the mob. By refusing to fight back he had tested his
principles, found them sound, and could recommend them
now as a model of Christian behavior. "I am more and more
convinced," he told Anna Benson, "that it is the duty of the
followers of Christ to suffer themselves to be defrauded,
calumniated, and barbarously treated, without resorting either
to their own physical energies, or to the force of human law,

210 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

for restitution and punishment." His clash with Boston's
outraged sensibilities had put a new edge on his old hunger
for holiness. Admittedly, slavery was only part of the problem
of human evil — why not cure all sin by following the ex-
ample of Christ? Peace and perfection — gospel truths and
God's prescription for the sins of the world. A radical cure,
no doubt, but certain. As he began collecting his anti-
slavery forces scattered by the October riot, the image of the
Master forgiving sinful man and offering peace remained
deeply etched in his mind.

He had been reluctant to leave the city but there was no
other choice. The house in Brighton Street, which he took
in order to be nearer his office, was proving far more costly
than Freedom's Cottage. Then, too, his health had suffered
from irregular hours and jangled nerves, and Helen con-
stantly worried about his safety in the streets. She was ex-
pecting her first child — a son born in February, 1836, whom
they named George Thompson Garrison. Thompson himself
was gone, smuggled out of the city on the Saint John packet.
The Liberator undoubtedly would have to be suspended un-
less Knapp worked a miracle, Although the mob had not
ventured near the office, the owners of Merchants Hall,
unwilling to oifer provocation, had ordered Knapp to clear
out. Knapp and Burleigh withdrew, taking with them all of
their stock and what little money there was, but not before
their creditors, sensing the Liberator's end had come, flocked
in.

Knapp managed to pay the debts, but an audit revealed a
hopeless tangle in the accounts. The financial snarl caused
raised eyebrows among some members of the society who
undertook to reprimand Garrison for his laxity. "I am in-
clined to think,'3 he complained in return, "that our friends,
wholly ignorant as they are, generally respecting the losses

"OUR DOOM AS A NATION IS SEALED" 211

and crosses of every newspaper concern, more or less, hardly
do us justice as to our past management. I admit that we
have not been methodical or sharp in keeping our accounts.
. . . We have not squandered or misapplied, but, on the
contrary, as a whole, been careful of our means/'2 Still, it
was with relief that he learned of the decision to torn the
financial responsibility for the paper over to Knapp and
leave him free to manage the editorial work on a salary sup-
plied by Loring and Sewall. He was happy to return to the
more congenial task of baiting moderate abolitionists.

In November, 1835, William Ellery Channing's Slavery
appeared in time to underscore the reaction of Bostonians to
militant abolitionism, for Channing spoke with the authority
of a veteran opponent of slavery. At the time of Lundy's
first visit to Boston in 1828 he was already criticizing slavery
while at the same time emphasizing the dangers of alienating
the slaveholders. "It seems to me," he wrote to Daniel Web-
ster in that year, uthat, before moving in this matter, we
ought to say to them distinctly, We consider slavery as
your calamity, not your crime, and we will share with you
the burden of putting an end to it.' " Ten years had scarcely
altered this view. Although he subscribed to the Liberator,
he had never approved of Garrison's "showy, noisy mode of
action." His scholarly habits and aristocratic tastes led him
to prefer the language of reason to the enthusiasm of agita-
tors who seemed to him to display more will than brains.
The Southern counteroffensive against civil liberties height-
ened his disapproval of slaveowners but did not moderate his
opinion of the abolitionists. In 1835 he told a friend that
were he to publish his criticisms of slavery, he would feel
bound not only to defend the abolitionists' rights but to en-
large on what he deemed their errors.

True to his promise, Channing examined the positions of

212 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

slaveholders and abolitionists in his essay and found both of
them wanting in common sense and Christian charity. He
began by establishing "a first, fundamental truth — a hu-
man being cannot rightfully be held and used as property."
From this principle he proceeded to other natural rights —
the right to seek knowledge, to better one's condition, to live
as a member of a community under the equal protection of
the law — rights violated by slavery. The initiative in remov-
ing slavery, however, he was prepared to leave to the slave-
owner, who alone "has the intimate knowledge of the char-
acter and habits of the slave." Abolitionists he thought
culpable on two counts: first, for hastily adopting the un-
workable formula of immediate emancipation, and secondly,
for indulging in irrational propaganda. The abolitionists, he
said, had done great mischief, nor was this mischief to be
winked at simply because it had been done with the best of
intentions. The anti-slavery party had fallen into the common
error of enthusiasts of taking a too narrow view and believing
that there was no other sin than the one they denounced. The
cause of the slave required zeal, but also the wisdom of
moderation. The abolitionists had only stirred "bitter passions
and a fierce fanaticism" which shut every ear and every heart
against the voice of conscience.

Many of the abolitionists, though "grieved at some few
censures," as Ellis Gray Loring explained, agreed with him
in pronouncing "nineteen twentieths" of Channing's book
sound in principle. A private dissenter was John Quincy
Adams, who objected to the "Jesuitical complexion" of Chan-
ning's arguments. "The wrong or crime of slavery is set forth
in all its most odious colors," Adams noted in his diary, "and
then the explanation disclaims all imputation of criminality
upon the slaveholders." Adams's doubts were echoed loudly
in the Liberator, which dismissed the author as an "Ishmael-

OUR DOOM AS A NATION IS SEALED ZI3

ite" and the pamphlet as "an inflated, inconsistent and slander-
ous production. ... a work in active collision with itself."3
After appropriating every one of the abolitionists' arguments,
Garrison complained, Channing neutralized their force by
impugning their methods. "He modestly asks us to give up
our watchword Immediate Emancipation,7 to disband our
societies, and to keep our publications from slaveholders."
What sort of give-and-take nonsense was this? The source
of Channing's heresy, he argued, was his foolish belief that
men were not always to be judged by their acts or institutions.
From this delusion it followed that slaveowners, far from
being the miserable sinners they appeared, might be thought
to act from disinterested motives of benevolence! The cardi-
nal point in immediate emancipation, on the other hand, was
its identification of slavery as sin. Sin allowed of no degrees;
no plan was needed to stop sinning. But Channing exonerated
the sinner — he divorced the sinner from his sin. His work,
therefore, was "utterly destitute of any redeeming, reform-
ing power," "calumnious, contradictory and unsound." Such
timeservers the abolitionists could well do without.

Garrison recognized Channing's pamphlet for what it was
— a threat to the continued control of the pioneer anti-slavery
men. As a liberal Channing was unable to remain silent any
longer; as a moderate he was unwilling to swallow immediate
abolition. To the Garrisonians his moderation seemed at best
a shuffling policy. "The plain English of the whole of it,"
Amos Phelps, Garrison's choleric friend, complained, "is this,
that he — and he is but one of a hundred such — can't keep still
any longer on the subject, but cannot bear to come out on
the subject without taking sundry exceptions, just to 'save
their skins' from the kicks we have had to take, as well as to
seem to have some justification for their long and guilty
silence."4 The real issue, however, lay deeper than Phelps

21 A THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYI> GARRISON"

realized. It was this: Could anti-slavery, born in religious
radicalism and nurtured by the New Theology of Beecher
and Finney, withstand an accession of the moderates? Could
it relinquish the notion of slavery as a sin and retain its
purity? Could the abolitionist sect become a church without
endangering its principles, let the unregenerate in without
undermining its holy work? In short, could abolition survive
success? Garrison thought not. Channing cried for moderation
and understanding, but the Declaration of Sentiments of the
national society branded slavery a sin. Channing proposed
reflection and study, and meanwhile the slave languished in-
chains.

Channing represented a way of life that was hostile to
evangelicalism. A man of breeding, he was first and last an
intellectual who distrusted undirected moral energy. He be-
lieved in intelligence and leisure, education, good taste and
social poise — all that was most suspect in the view of one who
had been raised on the meager intellectual fare of the evange-
lists Moreover, status meant more to Garrison than he would
admit. The reverse side of his myth of the self-made man
dxowed a seme of social inferiority tinged with envy. Al-
though he worked closely with Boston patricians m the next
few years — with Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy, Ellis
Gray Loring, Henry Bowditch — the alliances were not of
his making and the teriBS were always his own. Such a sur-
render could not be expected from Channing, in whose work
Garrison sensed a note of social superiority. To Channing the
Garrisonians were pious fools with violent impulses which
sprang from too much goodness and too little lucidity. They
were men who chose passion instead of reason which was die
mark of a true morality. Garrison, on the other hand, viewed
ChatTitirtg as the potential Judas of Christkn reform, a timid
dtc^-phiiosopher half afraid of his awn beliefs. He seemed

"OUR DOOM AS A NATION IS SEALED" 215

to personify in his passivity the dangers of too much think-
ing. Of the two, Channing was perhaps the better judge of
character and certainly the more magnanimous, for it was
he who made the first tentative gesture of friendship. In
March, 1836, he attended the hearings of the Lunt Com-
mittee, which had been appointed by the Massachusetts legis-
lature to investigate the need for a gag law against the aboli-
tionists, and in front of the assembled legislators approached
Garrison and took his hand. Only the most sanguine of the
anti-slavery men, however, believed that the gesture symbol-
ized a new alliance between the Garrisonians and an emergent
Northern liberalism.

The Lunt Committee was the Massachusetts answer to
Southern clamor against the abolitionists. At the suggestion
of Governor Everett a joint committee was appointed to
consider a law curtailing anti-slavery publications and meet-
ings. Immediately the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (as
the old New England Society was now called) requested a
hearing, which was held on March 4, 1836. At their briefing:
sessions the society chose their speakers carefully. The bur-
den of their case was carried by Loring, Sewall, and Folleny
the first two respectable if not brilliant speakers, the last an
eloquent and persuasive lecturer. The gallery of the Chamber
of Representatives was packed with members of the society
and anti-slavery sympathizers. All went well at the first hear-
ing as long as Loring and Sewall held the floor, but when
Follen mounted the rostrum and unleashed an attack on the
"mobocrats" of Boston and their "blood-hounds" who made
the streets of Boston unsafe, Chairman George Lunt lost pa-
tience. uStop sir! You may not pursue this course of remark.
It is insulting to the committee and to the Legislature which
they represent." Forbidden to continue, Follen sat down, the
abolitionists flatly refused to proceed, and the hearing was

216 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

adjourned. Next day the society drew up a memorial to the
legislature complaining of the uncivil treatment they had re-
ceived and demanding a free and open hearing, which de-
mand was granted and a second hearing arranged. At the
new hearing the Garrisonians fared little better. William
Goodell, Garrison's waspish companion in the days of the
National Philanthropist, arrived from New York and was
quickly added to the list of speakers. Goodell had lost none
of his bite since he and Garrison, seven years before, had
argued the merits of colonization; and he immediately took
the offensive by charging the committee with a "foul con-
spiracy" to subvert American freedom, only to be shut off by
Lunt. Unnerved by its encounter with professional agitators,
the committee adjourned never to meet again. Though it
censured the anti-slavery party, the Lunt Committee failed
to recommend measures for controlling their activities. Free
speech had won a notable victory.

Garrison's remarks at the hearing, sandwiched in between
the heavy arguments of Loring and Sewall, went almost un-
noticed in the ensuing uproar. Those who troubled to listen
caught a new note of sectionalism in his reference to Ameri-
can civil liberties. "Sir, we loudly boast of our free country,
and of the Union of these States. Yet I have no country! As
a New Englander, and as an abolitionist, I am excluded by
a bloody proscription from one-half of the national territory.
. . . Where is our Union? , . . The right of free and safe
locomotion from one part of the land to the other is denied
to us, except at the peril of our lives! . . . Therefore it is,
I assert, that the Union is now virtually dissolved."6

Virtually but not actually. Garrison was not a disunionist
yet: although he indulged freely in propaganda and prophecy,
he was not ready to admit that the Constitution was a pro-
slavery document. Like most of the abolitionists, he had

"OUR DOOM AS A NATION IS SEALED" 217

veered with the winds of political change, first denouncing
the Constitution as a "heaven-daring compact" and a "corrupt
bargain" and then discovering in the Congressional power
over the District of Columbia a beacon for Southern states.
Reluctantly he had come to accept the best abolitionist opin-
ion that Congress had no power to regulate slavery in the
states. As hope for effective state action receded in the
Thirties, however, and the abolitionists began to doubt their
ability to convert the South, they recognized the need for
capturing the Constitution. How much more effective their
campaign would be, how much more important the petition
and the vote, if they could prove that the Constitution was
really an anti-slavery document. If it encompassed the aboli-
tion of slavery throughout the Union, then abolitionists in
agitating for immediate action were only demanding due
enforcement of fundamental law. A tidy syllogism, simple,
unhistorical, and unrealistic. It was a measure of his deep
concern with politics in an election year that despite his pre-
dictions of disunion Garrison recognized the importance of
an anti-slavery interpretation of the Constitution and tried to
achieve one.

The task he set himself — that of producing a consistent
reading of the Constitution — was beyond his powers, for it
required the kind of reasoned historical method which he had
always disparaged. In the next few years other abolitionists,
better equipped and more persevering, worked out dozens of
theories of the unconstitutionality of slavery, all of them in-
genious, none of them convincing. In 1836, however, Garri-
son was pioneering in a juridical wilderness with no compass
to guide him. That he soon lost his bearings is hardly as sur-
prising as that he should have attempted the discovery at all.

He found his clue to the anti-slavery character of the
Constitution in the preamble, which, he announced, "pre-

218 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

supposes oppression and slavery, in any and every form,
wholly unwarrantable, and consequently is a warrant for a
general emancipation of the slaves." Emancipation as implied
in the preamble ought to be the work, not of Congress nor
yet of the state legislatures, but of "the people of each State,
and of the several States/' presumably gathered in special
convention. As for Article IV, Section 2, which provides for
the return of persons held to service and labor, this clause
does not apply to slaves because by law slaves are not "per-
sons" but "things." By the Constitution American slavery is
a thing unknown — every bondsman is therefore a freeman!
"The conclusion, then, to which people of the free States
must corne, is this — that southern slavery is a violation of the
United States Constitution, that it must be resisted as such."6
He granted that this new reading of the Constitution marked
a departure from his initial views. "We have often had occa-
sion to speak of the wickedness of the national compact," he
conceded but added quickly that his denunciation had been
"extorted in view of the construction which has been put
upon certain articles in the Constitution of the United States,
by the supreme and inferior courts — by the physical co-
operation of the free States to keep the slaves in bondage —
and by the tacit recognition of slavery which was made on
the adoption of the Constitution, between the several States."
Now with a proper understanding of the Constitution, the
abolitionists had only to uphold the fundamental law of the
land. In a single stroke he had legitimized abolition and com-
mitted his followers to political action.

First and most important in his program of constitutional
action was the vote with which abolitionists could organize
a Christian party in politics "not made up of this or that sect
or denomination, but of all who fear God and keep his com-
mandments and who sincerely desire to seek judgment and

"OUR DOOM AS A NATION IS SEALED" Zip

relieve the oppressed." Politics was admittedly a dirty busi-
ness and weak men might be tempted to sell their principles
for political gain. But changing the world meant accepting
the realities of political power. "I know it is a belief of many
professedly good men," he had written in 1834, "that they
ought not to 'meddle' with politics; but they are cherishing a
delusion, which, if it do not prove fatal to their own souls,
may prove the destruction of the country."7 However logical
the use of the ballot now seemed to him, there were those
abolitionists in 1836 to whom it was a snare. They argued
that from its inception the anti-slavery movement had been a
moral crusade, and they cited Garrison's own Declaration of
Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which
nowhere mentioned the duty to vote, as proof that the found-
ers had not meant to rely on the whims of mere politicians.
Impatiently Garrison brushed these objections aside with
the remark that since he had drawn up the declaration, he
might be assumed "competent to give an exposition of its
doctrines."8 The founders had clearly intended that both
moral suasion and the franchise be brought to bear on slavery.
Arguments without votes, he insisted, accomplished nothing.
To show the extent of his political commitment he sup-
ported Amasa Walker, the Democratic candidate for a Con-
gressional seat, against the conservative Whig, Abbott Law-
rence. "Ordinarily, I perceive little intelligence, and scarcely
any conscience, or honesty, or fear of God, at the polls," he
admitted to Boston's Negro voters. "The politics of this na-
tion, at the present time, are corrupt, prescriptive, and even
ferocious."9 The Whig cause, which he used to think "essen-
tially a good one," had fallen to the trimmer Clay; and Jack-
sonian Democracy, conceived in iniquity and unbelief, was
slavery's behemoth. Nevertheless, it behooved abolitionists
to study the Southern stratagem and, as he explained, "to be

22O THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

competent fully to unravel its political relations and hearings.
. . . Although we may not, in the technical sense of the term,
become politicians ourselves, yet it is vastly important that
we should watch, and expose mere politicians — such men as
Van Buren, Calhoun, Pinckney, and the like — and the latest
movements of the State and National Governments, in their
opposition to inalienable human rights should be made mani-
fest before all the people."10

As the Presidential campaign entered the summer of 1836
and the election in Massachusetts narrowed to a choice be-
tween the Little Magician and the trimmer Daniel Webster,
Garrison understood for the first time the nature of the aboli-
tionist dilemma. "Political abolitionists are now placed in an
awkward predicament," he admitted to his friends.11 Both
candidates had come out against abolition and had tried to
check the spread of anti-slavery influence. How could an aboli-
tionist vote for either of them? "To this I reply," Garrison
wrote a week before the election, "it is not necessary that they
should cast their votes in favor of any Presidential candidates,
nor do we see how they can properly do so."12 True aboli-
tionists belonged to no party or sect; they had emancipated
themselves once and for all from political shibboleths and
sectarian fetters. Abolition alone claimed their loyalty, and
"this cause they can never abandon, or put in peril, on any
pretext whatever." Since both parties had officially declared
their hostility to anti-slavery, reformers must be wary "lest
they be seduced from their integrity of character by political
intrigue" even if it meant relinquishing their right to vote.
Such was the origin of the revolution in the Garrisonian at-
titude which was to end a few years later in the doctrine of
disunion. Faced with a decision that involved choosing the
lesser of two evils — a cardinal rule in democratic politics —
Garrison refused to take the step which he believed an aban-

"OUR DOOM AS A NATION IS SEALED 221

donment of principle. In thus committing his followers to a
boycott of elections he was in effect challenging the demo-
cratic process. His theory of disunion did not appear in all
its splendid simplicity for two years, but the decision to
"come out" from a corrupt society was the result of his dis-
illusionment with the Presidential campaign of 1836. Hence-
forth the main avenue of political reform remained closed to
Garrison and those like him who preferred righteousness to
success.

For a while during the election year it seemed that an
alternative political route lay through Congress, where peti-
tions might do the work of ballots. Garrison had pioneered
in the organized use of the anti-slavery petition in Vermont
back in 1828 and was well aware of its advantages. In the
first place, the right of petition was guaranteed in the Consti-
tution: Congress was obliged to receive petitions and to take
some kind of action, however unfavorable, which meant in-
valuable publicity for the abolitionists. Then, too, petitions
were cheap, easy to circulate, and effective in bringing the
slavery question before the country. Garrison's first petition
campaign in 1828-1829 had provoked a lengthy and acri-
monious debate in the House before the members rejected
abolition of slavery in the District as inexpedient and danger-
ous. The advantages of a petition flood were too obvious to
be ignored.

He was not alone in recognizing the possibilities of the
petition. The national society, disappointed by the meager
results shown by the anti-slavery pamphlet, was turning to
what everyone agreed was a more economical and effective
propaganda device. By the middle of the decade pamphlets
had proved a costly failure. To be sure, they had won the
support of a few liberals chiefly concerned with civil liberties,
but this gain had been more than nullified by the problems

222 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

of cost and waste. No pamphlet paid for itself, distribution
was haphazard, and agents seldom knew whether the thou-
sands of tracts they scattered over the countryside were even
read. Petitions, on the other hand, were economical and
effective. As local and state societies took up the strategy
in earnest, the number of petitions forwarded to Congress,
twenty thousand in 1836, jumped to over three hundred
thousand two years later. Petitions against the foreign-slave
trade, petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of
Columbia, petitions against the admission of new slave states,
even petitions asserting the right of petition. A deluge of
signatures poured into Congress in a steadily increasing vol-
ume until the Senate and House of Representatives finally
found a way to divert the flood they could not shut off.

At first Garrison supported the petition campaign with
enthusiasm. He gave orders to Knapp "to make everything
give way (communications, editorials, and all) to the debates
in Congress upon the petitions."13 Feverishly he directed their
distribution and collection, and gloated over the increasing
number of signatures. "Send me your petitions to Congress,"
he ordered George Benson in January, 1836. " 'Keep the
mill a-going,' as the saying is. The blustering of the southern
members in Congress is ludicrous enough. The knaves and
cowards!"14 In April, when a bill for the admission of Arkan-
sas stalled in the House, he hastily collected and forwarded
petitions to keep it there. His enthusiasm waned, however,
when the Southern caucus in Congress rallied to retaliate. As
early as January, John C. Calhoun, sensing the need for a
countermeasure against petitions, urged his colleagues to meet
the danger now before it was too late. Thereupon he moved
to table all anti-slavery petitions as "a foul slander on nearly
one-half of the states of the Union." After a heated debate
Calhoun's motion was replaced by a compromise offered by

"OUR DOOM AS A NATION IS SEALED*' 22}

James Buchanan of Pennsylvania which avoided outright de-
nial of the right of petition by providing for the reception of
all anti-slavery petitions coupled with a rejection of their
contents. Buchanan's rule became standard Senate procedure
for dealing with the abolitionists. The House had John
Quincy Adams to contend with, and Adams waged a one-
man war against the "gag rule." Over his protests a special
committee of the House reported three resolutions drawn up
by its chairman, Henry Laurens Pinckney of South Carolina.
The first denied the power of Congress to abolish slavery in
the states; the second declared that slavery in the District of
Columbia should be left alone; and the third provided that
"all petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions, or papers
relating in any way to any extent to the subject of slavery
shall, without being printed or referred, be laid upon the
table and that no further action whatever be taken thereon."
The Pinckney gag became the first of a series of gag rules
designed to meet the abolitionist challenge. Not even Adams's
parliamentary skill could prevent this biennial infringement
of civil liberties: a gag rule was passed at the beginning of
each new session until finally, in 1845 at the height of the
Mexican crisis, the last of them was repealed. By that time
Garrison was well down the road to disunion in his retreat
from politics — a withdrawal that began with the Pinckney
resolutions in 1836.

From the White House, where Demon Democracy was to
rule for four more years, and from a Congress dominated
by apostate Pinckneys and Calhouns, Garrison turned hope-
fully to the church only to find theocratic conservatism in
the person of Lyman Beecher in the pulpit. In 1836 Beecher
still dreamed of a Christian America united in a single Protes-
tant church, and he was still determined to ignore any social
issue too thorny to be settled by love and charity. Beecher's

224 ^^ LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

difficulties proceeded from his bland assumption that no dif-
ferences were too great to be reconciled by a strong and
united church. He easily identified the chief dangers to the
country - "political atheism," "power-thirsty politicians,"
"the corrupting influence of preeminent prosperity," and
"universality of the suffrage." To combat these unwholesome
influences he invoked the power of church institutions, an
educated clergy, and, above all, the authority of the Bible.
In the summer of 1836 he delivered a ringing defense of the
divinity of the Sabbath as the moral sun of the universe and
God's instrument for man's salvation. The fourth command-
ment, as he explained it, emerged as the sublime ordering
principle of Christian life, a moral law enforced by a learned
clergy and offering the only permanent solution to the prob-
lems of democratic society. Beecher's sermon sounded the
call to the conservative clergy to meet the challenge of Garri-
son and his race of "impudent young men" whose defiance
of church law and clerical authority presaged a new age of
barbarism.

Garrison seized on Beecher's sermon as a lever with which
to pry open the whole question of slavery and the church*
It was not just that the good doctor's language was "extrava-
gant and preposterous," he complained. Beecher offered no
Scriptural authority for the divinity of the Sabbath. Even
more serious was Beecher's hidebound conservatism drawn
from the letter of the law rather than the spirit of Christ, his
program to make "the outward observance of one day of the
week ... of paramount importance to every thing else in
the moral and spiritual world, instead of being subordinate
and cooperative."15 True Christianity required the "service
of God, who is a spirit, and must be worshipped in spirit and
in truth," but Beecher and the theocrats believed that law
might do the work of spirit. They were loud, earnest, and

"OUR DOOM AS A NATION IS SEALED" 2 25

eloquent in behalf of the sanctity of institutions, yet timid
and apprehensive on the question of human rights. "Let men
consecrate to the service of Jehovah not merely one day in
seven, but all their time, thoughts, actions and powers/' Not
outward observance but inner light. "If men will put on
Christ," Garrison concluded, "they may be as free as their
Master, and he is Lord even of the Sabbath day."

These strictures not unnaturally stirred the New England
clergy to wonder and protest. "Free as their Master" — did
Garrison mean freedom from sin, the attainment of perfec-
tion? Letters poured into the Liberator office complaining of
the editor's veiled language and deploring his apparently
heretical notions. "As I anticipated, my remarks upon the
sanctity of the Sabbath, in the Liberator, are subjecting me
to much censure, particularly among the pious opposers of
the anti-slavery cause," Garrison remarked acidly. The New
Hampshire Patriot, Vermont Chronicle, Christian Mirror, and
Boston Recorder denounced him as a "monster" and an "in-
fidel," simply because he held that all time should be devoted
to the service of God and the good of mankind, because he
believed that "the real children of God 'do enter into rest'
here on earth, without being necessitated to wait for a respite
until eternity dawns."16 Under fire from a hostile press and
the conservatives in the Massachusetts Society, he agreed to
leave the Sabbath question alone and return to anti-slavery.
It was a promise he could not keep: his investigation of "that
pernicious and superstitious notion" had precipitated a con-
flict with the churches that lasted his lifetime.

His estrangement from the church, like the retreat from
politics, was the result of a profound disillusionment. He was
convinced that the country needed more practical righteous-
ness, more benevolent societies and good works. Instead of
attacking slavery, capital punishment, the land problem, and

226 THE ITERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

the other social evils of the day, the churches and the clergy
were indulging in doctrinal disputes, endless polemics and
theological hairsplitting. As the Great Revival smoldered out
there arose a new spirit of sectarian exclusiveness and denomi-
nationalism. The years after 1835 saw a clerical reaction to
revivalism which produced rifts in all of the major Protestant
denominations as the conservatives seized control of their
churches once more. In 1837 after a series of heresy trials,
the Old School Presbyterians finally succeeded in driving out
over half of their membership for doctrinal deviation. The
General Conference of the Methodist Church voted in 1836
to prohibit the discussion of slavery on the grounds that the
only "safe, Scriptural and prudent way" for their members
was "wholly to refrain from the agitating subject which is
now convulsing the country." The decision, which led Garri-
son to denounce the conference as "a cage of unclean birds,
and a synagogue of Satan," eventually provoked a number of
desertions that culminated in the great secession of 1845. The
Baptist Church suffered from similar desertions as the majority
of their clergy showed little inclination to lead their congre-
gations against slavery. Conservative forces and sectional pres-
sures were beginning to crack the fagade of Protestantism.

Garrison saw only the Christian logic of the situation. He
had grown up with the evangelical beliefs that everything lay
within the province of Christianity and that churches were
God's agents for purifying society. Since evil was one, and
all sins were related, the Christian solution meant applying
Christian principles to daily life. It was as simple as that. As
voluntary associations of true Christians the churches ought
to lead the way in reforming society. Instead they were
ignoring their responsibilities and neglecting all the "great
subjects" of the age. "Oh the rottenness of Christendom," he
wrote to May. "Judaism and Romanism are the leading

"OUR DOOM AS A NATION IS SEALED" 227

features of Protestantism. I am forced to believe that, as it
respects the greater portion of professing Christians in this
country, Christ has died in vain. In their traditions, their
forms, their vain j anglings, their self -righteousness, their will-
worship, their sectarian zeal and devotion, their infallibility
and exclusiveness, they are Pharisees and Saducees, they are
Papists and Jews."17 Far from encouraging good works and
personal holiness, the churches were erecting defenses against
it by isolating their congregations from the world of sin and
substituting worship for good works. The message of Christ
was being buried beneath the rubble of ritualism. "We shall
not be able to exclaim, 'O death, where is thy sting? O grave,
where is thy victory?' until we have died first unto sin —
crucified the old man with his lusts — put on the new man
who is after Christ — and risen in spirit with Him who is able
to save all who believe in Him. He in whom the Saviour
dwells can never be surprised by calamity or death — he has
entered into rest, even while in the flesh."18

"Putting on Christ," "dying unto sin," "entering into rest"
— these were the concepts of perfectionism, the vocabulary
of the preachers of human perfectibility. They were also the
words of the Vermont visionary John Humphrey Noyes,
who visited Garrison in the spring of 1837 and by converting
him to perfectionism helped change the course of his anti-
slavery crusade.

Christian perfectionism, the doctrine of personal holiness,
taught that by accepting Christ men could become literally
perfect. When men leave off sinning and accept Christ, so the
perfectionists believed, henceforth it is Christ who acts in
them and thus sin becomes an impossibility. In the routine of
their daily lives they can achieve this sinlessness if they only
want to, save their souls and at the same time regenerate so-
ciety. Perfectionism erected a whole social ethic on the simple

2i8 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

command, "Be ye perfect even as your heavenly Father is
perfect," and with it proposed to make heaven on earth.

Perfectionist doctrine appeared in many guises in the United
States after 1830: in the preaching of Finney and his Oberlin
followers; in the spiritual communings of zealots in New
York's Burned-Over District; and, in its most complete form,
in the teachings of John Humphrey Noyes. Although it
seemed to reflect Jacksonian beliefs in progress and the mis-
sion of America, in reality perfectionism received its inspira-
tion from the gospel of love and the Second Great Awaken-
ing. Its origins lay in the New Theology of Finney and the
New Haven School and in the conviction that "obligation
and ability are commensurate." Its initial premise was the
total freedom of man to follow Christ. Unlike Jacksonian
Democracy with its laissez-faire principles, perfectionism was
essentially exclusive, severe, and, in its final appeal, authori-
tarian. The perfectionists caught the vision of a holy life in
the sermons of the Great Revival and, by focusing sharply
on the experience of conversion, distorted the dream into a
millenarian fantasy. As originally propounded by Finney,
perfectionism meant simply a striving for holiness. Finney
defined the true Christian as one who preferred the glory of
God to his own selfish interests, and sanctification as "the
strength, firmness and perpetuity of this preference." By this
he did not mean a state of absolute freedom from sin but
only what he called an "assurance of faith" when men "ha-
bitually live without sin and fall into sin at intervals so few
and far between that, in strong language, it may be said in
truth they do not sin." Thus perfection became for Finney
an approximable goal rather than a final achievement — an
ideal to be pursued but never completely attained. In this
same spirit his followers at Oberlin preached perfectionism
as a prolonged act of dedication and denounced as "misguided

"OUR DOOM AS A NATION IS SEALED 2 29

fanatics" those who "having begun in the spirit ... try to
become perfect in the flesh." Such parading of one's purity
seemed to them to savor more of carnal will than divine grace
and a second blessing.

John Humphrey Noyes was perplexed by the halfway
doctrines of Finney and the hesitant affirmations of the New
Haven School. As a student at Yale he imbibed a draught of
free will that sent his literalist mind spinning. If Christ is
perfect and men are wholly free to follow his example, he
reasoned, then they may become perfect not in a metaphorical
sense of the word but in becoming actual partakers of the
divine nature and sharing in Christ's victory over sin and
death. "Faith identifies the soul with Christ," he explained,
"so that by His death and resurrection the believer dies and
rises again, not literally, nor yet figuratively, but spiritually;
and thus, so far as sin is concerned, is placed beyond the
grave, in heavenly places with Christ." Noyes had received
his second blessing in a Leonard Street boardinghouse in
New York where, in a fevered state and near insanity, he
experienced a "spiritual crucifixion" not as spectator but as
victim. "And at last the Lord met me with the same promise
that gave peace to my soul when I first came out of Egypt:
*if thou wilt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and
shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the
dead, thou shalt be saved.' By faith I took the proffered boon
of eternal life. God's spirit sealed the act, and the blood of
Christ cleansed me from sin." Soon word spread through
New Haven that "Noyes says he's perfect."19 This indeed
was the gist of the message which he came to Boston to tell
Garrison.

At the time of his meeting with Garrison in 1837 Noyes
was still working out the initial premises of his system. Com-
munal living, common property, complex marriage were

230 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

only hazy outlines on a shore dimly seen. What was already
clear to Noyes, however, was the new relationship of the
perfectionist to the society and the government of the United
States, and this he proceeded to explain to Garrison, Whittier
and Stanton. A week after the visit he sat down and put his
views on paper for Garrison's benefit. Presuming on "a fel-
lowship of views and feelings" which he had sensed at the
interview, he went on to expound the question of the king-
dom of God and its relation to the kingdom of this world.
"I am willing that all men should know that I have subscribed
my name to an instrument similar to the Declaration of '76,
renouncing all allegiance to the government of the United
States, and asserting the title of Jesus Christ to the throne of
the world."20 This was no metaphysical abstraction or dramatic
gesture, he assured Garrison, but a flat statement of belief and
a program for action. The United States government acted
the bully swaggering about and trampling underfoot both
the Constitution and the Bible, whipping slaves at the liberty-
pole and blaspheming in holy places by proclaiming slavery
a law of God. What then could the Christian do? Escape?
"But every other country is under the same reprobate au-
thority." The only solution lay in "coming out" from an
evil society, fleeing the country in spirit, and refusing to be
either a hypocrite or a tyrant. "Every person who is, in the
usual sense of the expression, a citizen of the United States,
i.e., a voter, politician, etc., is at once a slave and a slave-
holder—in other words a subject and a ruler." God would
justify him in the character of subject but not of ruler, Noyes
explained, and only by renouncing all cooperation with the
authorities of a sinful government could he finally cease to
do evil and learn to do well. Reform was merely an illusion,
since reprobation and reproof, as the history of the abolition
movement showed, only aggravated the sins of the people.

"OUR DOOM AS A NATION IS SEALED" 131

The sole choice left to the son of God was to declare war
on the government of the United States and to wage it with
the weapons of Christ — renunciation and repudiation.

In place of the erroneous axioms of American government
Noyes offered Garrison some self-evident principles of his
own. First, that the territory of the United States belongs to
God, and the American people are guilty of infidelity in trying
to perpetuate an existence outside the kingdom of Christ.
Second, that all nations will be dashed to pieces before the
arrival of the kingdom of God, and all governments there-
fore are merely "as shadows of good things to come. . . . The
Son of God has manifestly, to me, chosen this country for
the theater of such an assault. . . . My hope of the millennium
begins 'where Dr. Beecher's expires — viz., AT THE TOTAL
OVERTHROW OF THIS NATION." The United States will fall be-
fore a revolution, "a convulsion like that of France," out of
which will come instead of a sanguinary Napoleon the Prince
of Peace. "The convulsion which is coming will be, not the
struggle of death, but the travail of childbirth — the birth of
a ransomed world." To prepare for the glorious day Noyes
advised Garrison to give up his "fencing-school" skirmish
against slavery and join the "general engagement" by occupy-
ing the ground of universal emancipation from sin. "I counsel
you, and the people that are with you, if you love the post of
honor — the forefront of the hottest battle of righteousness —
to set your face toward perfect holiness. Your station is one
that gives you power over the nations. Your city is on a high
hill. ... I judge from my own experience that you will be
deserted as Jonah was by the whale — the world, in vomiting
you up, will heave you upon the dry land."

Garrison succumbed to this Messianic appeal with its deva-
statingly simple logic. Noyes made expediency and compro-
mise cardinal sins by erecting an absolute standard of conduct

2j2 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

with which to measure the slightest deviation from righteous-
ness. The simplicity of perfectionism masked its authoritarian
character, its oracular demand for total commitment to "prac-
tical holiness." It was as though Noyes had explained and
simplified all of Garrison's longings and desires. Perfectionism
satisfied his need for order at the same time it released his
tremendous energy. It offered the security of a seemingly
consistent system free from confusing exceptions and apparent
contradictions. It replaced reform with revolution complete
with apocalyptic vision and millenarian myth. But there was
an inherent paradox in perfectionism which Garrison failed
to see. It defined goals and at the same time denied the au-
thority of institutions through which these goals might be
attained. It pointed out the good society and then refused
permission to advance toward it. Agreeing on the nature of
evil, the perfectionists were unwilling to employ the political
power needed to wipe it out. As to both means and ends
perfectionism postulated anarchy by reducing social wrongs
to a question of personal sin and appealing not to community
interest but to individual anxieties. Instead of rational appeals
to self-interest or national welfare, it offered the jeremiad. In
perfectionism, the revival doctrine of sanctification reached
its outermost limits in the mystical cult of personal piety.

Inspired by Noyes and determined to bring all of his vari-
ous reform interests under a single head, Garrison set to work
adapting perfectionism to his own needs. Unlike Noyes, he
could not lay claim to a "second blessing," a regenerative
experience which could raise a theological concept into an
article of faith. He turned instead to the Bible which he
knew so well and pored over the gospels of Paul and John
for confirmation of Noyes's doctrines. "He that is born of
God cannot commit sin." "He that committed! sin is of the
devil." "There is therefore no condemnation to them who

UOUR DOOM AS A NATION IS SEALED" 233

are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh but after the
Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath
made us free from the law of sin and death." Here was proof
in abundance. Excited, he wrote to Henry Wright to share
with him his discovery.

The remedy . . . will not be found in anything short of faith
in our Lord Jesus Christ [he assured him]. Human governments
will remain in violent existence as long as men are resolved not to
bear the cross of Christ, and to be crucified unto the world. But
in the kingdom of God's dear Son, holiness and love are the only
magistracy. It has no swords, for they are beaten into plough-
shares — no spears, for they are changed into pruning-hooks — no
military academy, for the saints cannot learn war any more — no
gibbet, for life is regarded as inviolate — no chains, for all are free.
And that kingdom is to be established upon earth, for the time is
predicted when the kingdoms of this world will become the king-
doms of the Lord and of his Christ.21

In preparing for the Day of Judgment unregenerate politi-
cians and corrupt democracy will inevitably fail. "Our doom
as a nation is sealed," he wrote in the Liberator to explain
perfectionism to his readers. The day of probation is ended
and we are not saved. Republican government is doomed, for
the spirit of Christ has fled and left it "in a state of loathsome
decomposition."22

If the United States is destined to collapse, then why do the
perfectionists preach repentance? — "of what avail will it be
for any of us, in obedience to the command of heaven, to
take a bunch of hyssop, and strike the lintel and side-posts of
our dwellings with blood?" Garrison's reply was significant.
"Because the Lord is to pass through the land, to redeem the
captives and punish their oppressors; and when he seeth the
blood upon the lintels and side-posts, the Lord will pass
over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come into

2,4 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

our houses to smite us." At Judgment Day it will be every
man for himself, and the righteous will be found with the
angels.

Garrison's acceptance of perfectionism marked the ascend-
ancy in his mind of personal salvation over social responsi-
bility. Since its inception the anti-slavery movement had
veered between the poles of individual purity and communal
regeneration. Perfectionism destroyed the social force of
abolition and left the Garrisonians grouped about the pole of
sanctification like iron filings magnetized by the pull of holi-
ness. His critics were right in complaining of the anarchical
tendencies of perfectionism — the logical outgrowth of its
principles was disunion and the denunciation of "the cove-
nant with death/5

Meanwhile he occupied himself with the "great subject,"
defining its terms in verse and trying to grasp the essentials of
practical holiness. Perfection bestows eternal rest:

... It is to be

Perfect in love and holiness;
From sin eternally made free;

Not under law, but under grace;
Once cleansed from guilt, forever pure;

Once pardoned, ever reconciled;
Once healed, to find a perfect cure;

As JESUS blameless, undefiled;
Once saved, no more to go astray. . . .

The political implications of perfectionism he explained in
a letter to Henry Wright, who was no less enthusiastic about
Christian anarchy. "Human governments pre-suppose that
the government of God is essentially defective — not suffi-
ciently broad and comprehensive to apply to every action of
life between man and man, and every exigency that may arise

"OUR DOOM AS A NATION IS SEALED 235

in national concerns. . . . But human government rests on a
choice between two evils, both of which the gospel is de-
signed to destroy." Besides, human society cannot live in a
state of anarchy without rapidly annihilating itself. "What
then?" he asked Wright. "Shall we, as Christians, applaud
and do homage to human government? Or shall we not
rather lay the axe at the root of the tree, and attempt to
destroy both cause and consequence together? Happy will
it be for mankind, when He whose sole right it is to reign,
shall come and reign."23 Until that time he foresaw a long
period of trial before he gained acceptance for these new
truths. Unhappily, his own assignment of winning the assent
of the American people seemed to require neither charity
nor forbearance.

A Woman in the Pulpit

IN JUNE, 1837, Garrison attended the annual meeting of the
American Anti-Slavery Society in New York. Between ses-
sions he wandered into the Ladies Anti-Slavery Convention
meeting a few blocks away and there met "Carolina's high-
souled daughters," Sarah and Angelina Grimke. The Grimke
sisters, keen abolitionists and fierce feminists both, were
currently holding forth on the sins of the slaveholders before
assemblies of New York ladies and had caused so much of a
stir in the city that they were already contemplating an
invasion of New England. Garrison must have been encourag-
ing, for two weeks later the sisters arrived in Boston primed
with lectures for New England audiences and anxious to
enlist his support for the emancipation of women.

Sarah and Angelina Grimke, aged forty-four and thirty-
two, were the prim, plain spinster daughters of a Charleston
planter. Educated for the gaieties of Charleston society, the
sisters reluctantly endured their share of fancy balk and
theater parties until their brother, fresh from an indoctrination
at Yale, mercifully set them free from worldly snares by con-
verting them to Christian reform. In 1835 *hey moved to
Philadelphia, where first Sarah and then Angelina joined the
Quakers and became abolitionists. Both were outspoken and
remarkably articulate if more than a trifle antiseptic. In that

A WOMAN IN THE PULPIT 237

year Angelina published an Appeal to the Christian Women
of the South and Sarah an Epistle to the Clergy of the South,
high-toned pleas for the slave, both of which were promptly
burned by the Charleston postmaster. The sisters deemed
such rancor a sufficient deterrent to their return and hence-
forth confined their activities to the North.

The national society could hardly afford to ignore such
promising material, and accordingly the sisters were invited
to attend Weld's series of lectures to prepare for work in
the field. They impressed Weld as much by their impatience
as by their intelligence, for they threw themselves into anti-
slavery work in New York as though it held the answer to
woman's worth to American society. They visited Negro
homes, addressed women's anti-slavery auxiliaries, held court
for the leading abolitionists of the city, and meanwhile per-
fected their considerable histrionic talents. They were more
than ready when Garrison beckoned them to Boston.

Sarah was a seeker who found in the anti-slavery crusade
a temporary escape from the boredom and loneliness that
awaited the spinster in the nineteenth century. She was tall,
angular, homely beyond belief, on the threshold of middle
age, unhappy with her status and determined to change it.
She had experimented with Methodism and Presbyterianism
before seeking an outlet for her feminist energies in the So-
ciety of Friends. Even among the Quakers she felt constrained
by rules and customs that seemed to advertise the natural
inferiority of her sex. Everywhere she turned she encountered
the will to keep women in unholy subjection to men. "I am
greatly mistaken," she once told Weld, "if most men have
not a desire that women should be silly." They need be silly
no longer, she declared; the great self-evident principles of
human rights could be invoked in behalf of women as well
as slaves, Angelina, younger and more impetuous, though

238 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

scarcely prettier than her sister, agreed that the cause of
woman's rights was bound to that of the slave. Already half
in love with Weld and determined to show him her real
worth, she easily mastered the art of lecturing and began to
use the anti-slavery platform as a sounding board for her
feminist as well as her abolitionist convictions. Her sister was
apt to stammer and mumble through her talks, but Angelina
soon perfected a delivery which, while properly reticent, was
also eloquent and moving.

Together the Grimkes took Boston by storm. In the be-
ginning they spoke only to small groups of dedicated females,
but soon they branched out to "promiscuous assemblies" of
determined wives and their curious husbands who came to
hear the famous sisters exalt the national character of the
American woman. Angelina and Sarah warmed to Boston
immediately. "There is some elasticity in this atmosphere,"
Sarah reported to Weld. "I have been truly refreshed by
mingling with the abolitionists of Boston and vicinity. ... I
feel as if I was helped, strengthened, invigorated, and I trust
the cause of God will be advanced."1 The advance of aboli-
tion, however, was destined to be stalled by the whims of
these feminine perfectionists. Courageous and self-reliant as
they appeared, the sisters were in fact singularly dependent
upon the ideas and opinions of men. In New York they had
found a father and teacher in Theodore Weld; in Boston
they inevitably fell under the spell of the "noble Garrison."

Since his fateful interview with Noyes, Garrison had been
too busy attending conventions and worrying over the future
of the Liberator to devote himself wholly to perfectionism.
At the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Society earlier
that year he had squelched objections to his editorial thunder-
tones and won the support of the Board of Managers for his
plan for obtaining financial aid while keeping his editorial

A WOMAN IN THE PULPIT 239

independence. With the society supposedly behind him he
began lashing out at the New England churches and their
ministry, ridiculing the pastoral office and denouncing the
complacency of congregations. Some of his censure was ab-
surdly petty. "We object to the term 'house of God' as ap-
plied to any building made by man," he announced. "It has
begotten much superstition, is not correct in fact, nor is it
authorized by the gospel." He did not stop with mere carp-
ing, however, but proceeded to accuse the churches of foster-
ing corruption and despotism and asked whether the advo-
cates of truth were not obliged to come out from among
them. Not satisfied with his general indictment he singled
out Professor Moses Stuart of Andover and President Wilbur
Fisk of Wesleyan as objects of rebuke. Fisk had asked Stuart
for his views on the Biblical sanction for slavery; and Stuart,
after careful study of the New Testament, gave as his opin-
ion that the relation of master and slave was not, as a matter
of course, abrogated between all Christians. When Garrison
read this "piece of self-contradiction and absurdity," he dis-
missed it with the sneering observation that "no man —
whether he be a Doctor of Divinity or a Doctor of Law, or
the most learned rabbi in the land, can write or talk five
minutes, either in vindication or palliation of the crime of
slaveholding without uttering gross absurdity or flat blas-
phemy."2 This was his mood when the Grimkes swept into
New England.

He was in Brooklyn recuperating from an exhausting round
of conventions when the Grimkes arrived. The sisters thus
fell into the eager if not very capable hands of Henry Wright,
his partner in perfectionism and an agent of the national so-
ciety in New England. Garrison did not meet the formidable
sisters until the end of the summer, but meanwhile he began
surveying the questions of slavery and human government

240 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GAKRISON

from the rarefied plane of Noyes's perfectionism. It was a
dizzying perspective. Human government, he concluded, was
better than anarchy just as a hailstorm was preferable to an
earthquake or the smallpox to the Asiatic cholera. Forms of
government hardly mattered, since all institutions rested on
ambition and pride, selfishness and hatred.3 The idea of any
human government supposed that God's plan was radically
defective. Left to their own devices men would rapidly
annihilate themselves and peace would come with the rule of
Christ.

Politicians and philosophers have sometimes foolishly speculated
about the best forms of human government, and their relative
adaptation to the conditions of mankind in the various parts of
the Globe — whether, for instance, the republican form is not
better than the monarchial, and the elective than the hereditary,
in all cases. But this is idle. What is government but the express
image of the moral character of a people? As a general rule, in
the nature of things, the deeper a nation is sunken in ignorance
and depravity, the more arbitrary and cruel will be the govern-
ment established over it, both in a religious and political point
of view.4

While Garrison pondered the apocalypse in his rustic sur-
roundings, the Grimkes and Henry Wright were preparing
the day of its coming. "Dear brother Wright," as Angelina
called him, was the first and most durable of the Garrisonian
radicals. He was a spare, rawboned man with granitic fea-
tures, close-cropped iron-gray hair and glacial blue eyes —
one of Garrison's yeomen who "have gloriously triumphed
over the aristocracy of the city." By trade a hatmaker, he
studied theology at Andover and at the age of twenty-six
took a church in West Newbury just as Garrison launched
the Free Press and, like him, was soon swallowed up in the
sea of moral reform. He served as agent of the American

A WOMAN IN THE PULPIT

Sunday School Union, became a member of William Ladd's
peace society, and joined the abolitionists in 1835. Garrison
pronounced him "a valuable acquisition to our cause — a fear-
less, uncompromising and zealous Christian." He might have
added that Wright was also restless, vain and querulous. One
of the most remarkable aspects of a career studded with
broken friendships was the deep affection which these two
overbearing and ambitious men had for each other. Both were
"ultras" who looked out at the sins of the world through the
strong lens of moral absolutes and spied their salvation in
works of practical holiness. When he first met the Grimkes
and appointed himself their agent, Wright was one of Weld's
Band of Seventy and the Children's Agent for New England.
An uncompromising Christian he may have been, but an ef-
fective anti-slavery agent he certainly was not. His obsession
with nonresistance and his willingness to drop the subject of
slavery like a hot coal whenever the peace question arose made
him something of a headache to the Agency Committee, who
were less interested in the millennium than in freedom for
the slave. A lecture tour by two ardent feminists endorsed
by Garrison and managed by Wright contained all the ex-
plosive ingredients of a crisis.

With Wright as counselor the Grimkes quickly took up
perfectionism in earnest. They read Noyes's paper eagerly
and discussed with Wright the fine points of nonresistance,
public worship, the status of women, and the failings of hu-
man government. "Sometimes I am ready to turn away from
the contemplation of these subjects least [sic] my mind
should not dwell sufficiently on slavery," Sarah confessed
to Weld, but added that the more she reflected on the prob-
lem, the more she was convinced that "light on every subject
is a blessing."6 Angelina was even more obdurate. When the
New England dergy began to object to her addressing mixed

242 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

audiences, she replied that "the time to assert a right is the
time when that right is denied," and that if she were to be of
any use in the anti-slavery cause her right to labor in it must
be firmly established. Anti-slavery conservatives, she com-
plained, were trying hard to separate what God had joined
together. For one, she did not see how different moral re-
forms could ever be kept entirely distinct. "The whole
Church Government must come down," she informed the
startled Weld. "The clergy stand right in the way of reform,
and I do not know but this stumbling block too must be
removed before Slavery can be abolished, for the system is
supported by them; it could not exist without the Church as
it is called."6 Poor Weld, who loved Angelina but not her
"highly analogical" mind, objected strenuously to arguments
which he told her "reversed the laws of nature. . . . No moral
enterprise when prosecuted with ability and any sort of
energy EVER failed under heaven so long as its conductors
pushed the main principles and did not strike off until they
got to the summit level," he reminded the sisters sternly. On
the other hand, every moral enterprise that ever foundered
was capsized by a gusty side wind. Perfectionism and woman's
rights, he could see, were blowing up a storm in Boston that
might swamp the anti-slavery bark.7

In September the sisters met Garrison at long last. "Dear
brother Garrison has been passing the day with us," Sarah
reported from Brookline, "as iron sharpeneth iron so doth a
man the countenance] of his friend and it has cheered my
spirit to find that he unites fully with us on the subject of the
rights of women."8 He joined in deploring the failures of
New England ministers and promised to keep the Liberator
filled with editorials upholding the cause of freedom for
women. The sisters suggested he abandon anti-slavery as the
exclusive object of his paper and include all the "grand prin-

A WOMAN IN THE PULPIT 243

ciples" of moral reform. "I feel somewhat at a loss," he ad-
mitted, "to know what to do — whether to go into all the
principles of holy reform, and make the abolition cause sub-
ordinate, or whether still to persevere in the one beaten track
as hitherto." Before he had time to decide, the Grimkes had
touched off the controversy which was to end two years
later in the disruption of the anti-slavery movement.

The trouble began, Sarah admitted, when the Lord "very
unexpectedly made us the means of bringing up the discussion
of the question of woman's preaching."9 Even crusty Amos
Phelps temporarily relinquished his Pauline prejudices and
went to hear Angelina. Large and enthusiastic audiences led
Sarah to conclude that the time was approaching when Chris-
tians would realize that there was neither male nor female
but that all were one in Christ. That time, she soon dis-
covered, was not yet. The General Association of Congrega-
tional Ministers, which met in the summer of 1837, saw in the
Grimkes' indiscreet behavior a means of settling accounts with
Garrison for his unseemly remarks on their churches. The
ministers drew up a pastoral letter denouncing the tendency
of reformers to introduce "perplexed and agitating subjects"
into their congregations and deploring the loss of deference
to the pastoral office which was the mark of Christian urban-
ity and "a uniform attendant of the full influence of religion
upon the individual character." Without naming the Grimkes
or Garrison the pastoral letter warned of "the dangers which
at present seem to threaten the female character with wide-
spread and permanent injury" by leading her to transcend
"the modesty of her sex." Especially did they bewail the
intimate acquaintance and "promiscuous conversation" of
females with regard to things which ought not to be named,
"by which that delicacy which is the charm of domestic life,
and which constitutes the true influence of woman in society,

244 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

is consumed and the way opened, as we apprehend, for de-
generacy and ruin."10 No longer would the Grimkes be
permitted their oblique references to the sexual habits of slave-
holders.

As a weapon against Garrison the pastoral letter was not
very formidable and might best have been ignored, but be-
fore he mustered a reply a second allegation burst on the
public, an Appeal of Clerical Abolitionists on Anti-Slavery
Measures, signed by five clergymen from eastern Massachu-
setts. The dissenters found the courage publicly to disapprove
Garrison's course and accuse him of "hasty, unsparing, al-
most ferocious denunciation" of everybody who disagreed
with him. "The time is very fully in our recollection," they
declared, "when *we were not abolitionists; nor are we con-
scious that *we were then either hypocrites or knaves."11

The clerical appeal, though the work of only a handful of
ministers, had the merit of broadening the charges against
Garrison from mere clerical pique at the invasion of women
to a general indictment of his radical methods. For his part,
Garrison was delighted with it since it gave him a chance to
fight on the solid ground of anti-clericalism rather than on the
shifting sands of woman's rights. Hurriedly he sent his reply
for immediate publication in the Liberator. Ignoring the
charges of personal malice and incompetence, he identified
as the chief supporters of slavery those "latter-day Jesuits"
and "rabbis" in sacerdotal robes who presumed to censure
honest men. "Abolitionism brings ministers and laymen upon
the same dead level of equality, and repudiates all 'clerical'
assumption and spiritual supremacy. Nothing can be more
offensive to it, than this attempt to enforce opinions in an
oracular tone as CLERGYMEN."12

Meanwhile the New England Spectator, the organ of the
clerical party, printed an attack from still another clergyman,

A WOMAN IN THE PULPIT 245

James T. Woodbury, who had been longing for the chance
to squelch the Liberator. "I am an abolitionist," Woodbury
wrote, "and I am so in the strictest sense of the term; but I
never swallowed Wm. Lloyd Garrison, and I never tried to
swallow him." Garrison, he continued, was bent on the over-
throw of the Sabbath, the ministry, and the whole American
church. "We are not willing for the sake of killing rats, to
burn down the house with all it contains." With his "peculiar
theology" Garrison had become a menace to the anti-slavery
cause and must be disavowed. "No doubt, if you break with
Garrison, some will say, 'You are no abolitionist,' for, with
some, Garrison is the god of their idolatry. He embodies
abolition. He is abolition personified and incarnate." He was
nonetheless dangerous, Woodbury declared, and called on
Christian reformers to save the anti-slavery cause from heresy
and atheism.13

Woodbury's letter was a tactical error, for it shifted the
ground of attack once more from Garrison's anti-clericalism
to questions of personality. Garrison was quick to oblige his
critic. His distaste was not an isolated case, he reminded
Woodbury. "The robbers of God's poor, the supporters of
lynch law, the chief priests, scribes and pharisees, have all
been unable to 'swallow Wm. Lloyd Garrison.' " Yet in
a sense, he pointed out, all thoroughgoing abolitionists had
followed him from colonization to abolition, then from gradual-
ism to immediatisni. How else explain his "delightful associ-
ation" with men of all political parties and religious denomi-
nations? Because of his uncompromising way of telling the
truth he was, in fact, indispensable to the cause.14

The Executive Committee of the national society viewed
this quarrel with growing dismay. On the scene was one of
their agents, Henry B. Stanton, a sharp-eyed and hardheaded
organizer with little patience for either Garrison's religious

246 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

notions or the pompous pretensions of the clerical party,
Stanton identified the cause of the row as Garrison's personal
brand of "locofocoism" which had ignited the fuse of a con-
servative reaction. Unless the Executive Committee inter-
vened, he warned, there would be a war of extermination that
could spell the end of anti-slavery in New England. "I ex-
pect to see the Liberator containing 3 or 4 columns castigating
bro. Woodbury and the Andover students," he predicted,
" — and next week, in the Liberator, I expect to see 4 or 5
columns — in reply to the 'Protest' of bros. Fitch and Towne,
and then in due time, another reply to their next 'protest,' and
then their rejoinder, and his surrejoinder with their rebutter,
and his surrebutter."15 The dissidents demanded nothing less
than the separation of the Liberator and the Massachusetts
Anti-Slavery Society. Woodbury, Fitch and Company had
been pushed to the wall and were resolved to stand it no
longer; the Garrisonians were determined on war to the
knife. "They will not yield an inch, to prevent the formation
of a thousand new organizations." Unless an "umpire influ-
ence" from New York prevented it, the New England
mutiny, Stanton cautioned the Executive Committee, would
destroy the cause.

But what was the Executive Committee to do? Lewis
Tappan thought the whole affair inflated to ridiculous pro-
portions, a local squabble which the national society could
well ignore. He wrote Garrison to this effect and added that
he did not think the clerical appeal such a "monstrous sub-
ject" that it required all the abolition artillery in the nation
to dispose of it. Besides, he reminded Garrison, the Liberator
frequently gave cause for complaint. "THE SPIRIT EXHIBITED

BY THE EDITOR PRO. TEM [Oliver JohllSOn] AND SOMETIMES
BY YOURSELF, HAS NOT BEEN SUFFICIENTLY KIND AND CHRIST-
LIKE."16 James Birney, now a full-fledged abolitionist, went

COURTESY OF THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM

HELEN BENSON GARRISON-

GARRISON AT THIRTY

GARRISON AT SEVENTY

BENJAMIN LUNDY

PRUDENCE CRANDALL,
THE QUAKER SCHOOLMISTRESS

SAMUEL JOSEPH MAY

ANGELINA GRIMKE

SARAH GRIMKE

THEODORE WELD

HENRY C. WRIGHT

NATHANIEL P. ROGERS

ABBY KELLEY FOSTER

STEPHEN SYMONDS FOSTER

A WOMAN IN THE PULPIT

even further in reproaching Garrison for his lack of self-
control. "If Mr. Garrison, or anyone else among us, thinks
that he is authorized to judge and rebuke as Christ judged
and rebuked, it becomes him to recall the instances of melt-
ing love, the meekness, the forbearance of the Master."17
Garrison shot back the terse rejoinder that "Bro. Birney ap-
pears to have grown exceedingly fastidious and hypercritical."

It was Elizur Wright, however, who wrote to Garrison all
the "objectionable things" that candor induced him to say.
He had hoped that Garrison could have conducted his paper
"without travelling off the ground of our true, noble, heart-
stirring Declaration of Sentiments," but since he had chosen
to wander from the straight path of abolition, he must not
complain when other abolitionists as dedicated as himself
objected to his novel views. Wright spoke of himself as typi-
cal of these men. "As you well know, I am comparatively
no bigot to any creed, political or theological; yet to tell the
plain truth, I look upon your notions of government and
religious perfection as downright fanaticism — as harmless as
they are absurd. I would not care a pin's head if they were
preached to all Christendom; for it is not in the human mind
(except in a peculiar and diseased state,) to believe them."
How could Garrison expect to avoid the censure of all intelli-
gent men when he insisted on making these heretical opinions
the test of anti-slavery orthodoxy? Leave the question of
government alone until the Negro was free, Wright warned
— "then you may make your will upon it for all of me. . . .
But if this cannot be done, why, come out plainly and say you
have left the old track and started on a new one — or, rather,
two or three new ones at once, and save us from the miserable
business of making disclaimers."18

Wright's plain speaking only convinced Garrison that the
forces of sectarianism had invaded national headquarters,

248 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

where something was obviously amiss. "Our friends at New
York," he replied ominously, "may rely upon it, that the
course which they have resolved to pursue, respecting this
matter, will very much displease the great body of abolition-
ists, and alienate them and their money from the Parent So-
ciety."19 Justice clearly upheld the Garrisonians, and the
Executive Committee must not mind if the Garrisonians, in
turn, gave Justice a helping hand.

The scenario for the Clerical Conspiracy was pure opera
bouffe, but the questions it raised were — and still are — funda-
mental to American politics. Where does social reform be-
gin — in the gradual improvement of society or in the con-
science of the private citizen? What is the more effective
instrument of reform — the political minority which accepts
its role in a democratic society or the religious sect which
repudiates the community and its laws? Is it better to accept
half a loaf or refuse to take less than the whole? Who ac-
complishes more — the moderate who will bargain to get
what he wants or the radical who will not? The choice be-
tween political reform and religious revolution had been
implicit in the anti-slavery movement from the beginning.
The abolitionist crusade in the United States was not simply
an appendage to Jacksonian Democracy, the religious corol-
lary to a new secular democratic spirit. The anti-slavery
impulse was fundamentally a religious urge and the abolition-
ist pioneers were endowed with a lively sense of their mission.
They saw their work as nothing less than the completion of
the great Protestant tradition of Luther, Calvin, Knox, Ed-
wards, and Wesley — they were preparing the climax of a
three-hundred-year Reformation. They knew that their
strength lay in the churches of America and the deep-rooted
religious sense of the people which undercut the experience
of revolution. They had their share of Jacksonian optimism,

A WOMAN IN THE PULPIT 249

but for them Manifest Destiny carried a special and an overtly
religious meaning — the destiny of a chosen people to bring
divine light to the rest of the world. The importance of the
American political experiment as they understood it lay in
the attempt to fuse religious truths and political techniques.
Most of them accepted the need for popular democracy even
though they did not like all its consequences. Gradually, as
the movement grew, the abolitionists began to feel the pres-
sure of a hostile environment driving them to broaden the
scope of their reform to include political aspirations and
economic motives in addition to the original religious plat-
form.

Thus the anti-slavery crusade, split by the same inner con-
tradictions as was Christianity itself, marched under the con-
flicting standards of personal holiness and social obligation,
following first the directives of an inner voice and then the
dictates of common sense. The Anti-Slavery Society was
both a church and a sect — an institution appealing to the
community at large, and a gathered group of true believers.
The anti-slavery formula, "immediate emancipation," reflected
this ambiguity. Strictly construed it meant instant repentance
and direct action; upon deliberation, it seemed to signify
some kind of political engagement. These alternatives were
also embodied in the personalities of the abolitionists them-
selves—in the shrewd and practical organizers like Weld,
Birney, and Stanton, and the zealots like Henry Wright,
Charles Burleigh, and Garrison.

It was Weld who explained the philosophy of adjustment
to the Grimke sisters in the hope of winning them back from
Garrison and perfectionism. He was in love with Angelina
but disturbed at the thought of a wife who would dedicate
both their lives to renovating the world at a single stroke. In
a series of long and painfully reasonable letters he convinced

250 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

them of the impracticaHty of their views. "Since the world
began," he wrote, "Moral Reform has been successfully ad-
vanced only in one way, and that has been by uplifting a
great self evident central principle before all eyes. Then after
keeping the principle in full blaze till it is admitted and ac-
credited and the surrounding mass of mind is brought over
and committed to it, then the derivative principles which
radiate in all directions from this main central principle have
been held up in the light of it and the mind having already
embraced the central principle, moves spontaneously outward
over all its relations"** How did Luther give the Reformation
its irresistible momentum but by making the sale of indul-
gences his "fulcrum and lever"? How explain the success of
reform in England unless by the fact that slavery was dis-
cussed for years "in every corner; the whole English mind
was soaked with it." Reformers had to be practical, he re-
minded the sisters, and practicality meant a realistic accom-
modation of means to ends. To demand a total change in the
human spirit all at once or approach a society with a panacea
was to reverse the order of nature and misread history and
the human condition.

In attempting to counteract the millenarian spirit issuing
from 46 Washington Street, Weld spoke for a growing num-
ber of abolitionists who were resolved to make anti-slavery
respectable. Birney, Stanton, Wright and Joshua Leavitt were
already thinking of organizing the political strength of anti-
slavery and were agreed on the need to keep it free from
heretical ideas. It seemed to them that Garrison was using his
prestige to destroy the movement. Four years ago they too
had believed in the sufficiency of a moral appeal based on
the formulas of sin and repentance, but in 1837 there was
need for a few second thoughts. In the first place, their faith
in the anti-slavery tract, the petition and the lecture had been

A WOMAN IN THE PULPIT 251

shaken by an obvious lack of results. Without the support
of the churches anti-slavery was doomed. What was needed,
they realized, was an organized attempt to win over all of the
major denominations. For this reason they resented Garrison's
attacks on the clergy. How, they asked, could anti-slavery
make converts without relying on religious and political
institutions? Implicit in their argument was the assump-
tion that the only practicable way of reforming the South
was by outvoting it. The logic of their argument led directly
to the anti-slavery political party built with economic and
political as well as moral planks. It meant secularizing aboli-
tion and adjusting it to the role of a political minority in a
democratic society. It meant accepting the limitations of
minority action — compromises, concessions, limited goals —
and working within the institutional framework of American
democracy, co-operating with churches, infiltrating political
parties or creating new ones, educating people by the slow
process of discussion, surrendering absolute judgments for
limited and conditional support, trading moral will for votes.
In short, it meant the Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party, and
ultimately the Republican Party.

Thus by 1837 anti-slavery had reached a crossroad. One
road led into the broad highway of American political re-
form. This was the road pointed out by Weld, Birney and
Stanton that connected with the continuity and conservative
tradition of American life. The other road was a highroad of
moral idealism which cut directly across the conservative
pattern of American society to revolution, secession and civil
war. This was the road Garrison chose.

To a certain extent his choice was dictated by the demands
of his authoritarian temperament. What concerned him was
not slavery as an institution but the slave as a child of God. If
his diagnosis was correct, American society was sick and

252 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

needed the kind of surgery that only a Christian radical could
perform. Slavery was one of the symptoms of approaching
decline, but there were others — the treatment of women,
the oppression of the poor, expansionism and a war spirit.
For all these ills perfectionism offered a total cure. But moral
rehabilitation was too urgent a problem to be left to the
whims of weak men with their corrupt institutions. How
could he work with ministers who accepted slavery or with
politicians who denied women their rights? How could he
embrace children of darkness who reveled in sin? A true Chris-
tian was compelled to come out from among them, to re-
nounce their evil ways and escape everlasting perdition. As
he reviewed the anti-slavery record, it seemed to him that
abolitionists had never really been either tolerant or demo-
cratic. They were servants of the Lord, not catchpenny poli-
ticians. They had spurned a compromise with the coloniza-
tionists, demolished Lyman Beecher's fanciful scheme of
conciliation, and courted the most dangerous kind of un-
popularity. Why should they balk at perfectionism? Everyone
admitted the evil of slavery was its denial of Christ to the
black man. Then any law, institution, or government which
refused to acknowledge the enormity of that sin would have
to be destroyed. The children of light, he saw now, were
covenanted together for the subversion of wickedness and
the establishment of freedom — the absolute freedom of the
righteous who have escaped the bondage of sin.

Garrison's generation proceeded from the premise that
there were no moral issues or political differences fundamental
enough to paralyze the energies of free government. For-
getting its revolutionary heritage, it believed that moral ques-
tions, like political interests, were matters for adjustment,
and that in exchange for their promise of good behavior
minorities might receive a majority guarantee of fair play.

A WOMAN IN THE PULPIT 253

This assumption meant that the American democracy func-
tioned effectively just so long as there were no absolute moral
judgments to clog the machinery. Garrison's belief was one
of these absolutes. For him the central fact of American life
was the immorality of slavery. If he ever convinced the peo-
ple of the North of that fact, constitutional government
would collapse. His kind of agitation made civil war a distinct
possibility by disclosing the impotence of compromise and
good will in the face of the moral idealism of an elite.

To this perfectionist elite he addressed his prospectus for
the eighth volume of the Liberator, promising them that slav-
ery would still be the "grand object77 of his labors "though
not, perhaps, so exclusively as before." He offered these
"honest-hearted77 and "pure-minded7' faithful the dominion
of God:

... the control of an inward spirit, the government of love, and
. . . the obedience and liberty of Christ. As to the governments of
this world, whatever their titles or forms, we shall endeavor to
prove, that in their essential elements, and as at present adminis-
tered, they are all Anti-Christ; that they can never, by human
wisdom, be brought into conformity with the will of God; . . .
that all their penal enactments being a dead letter without an
army to carry them into effect, are virtually written in human
blood; and that the followers of Jesus should instinctively shun
their stations of 'honor, power and emolument.'21

For the power of democratic institutions he now substituted
his old belief in the absolute authority of the righteous man.

It was not with righteousness but with women's votes that
he finally defeated his clerical enemies at a meeting in Wor-
cester. To insure a majority he arranged for the admission of
women delegates in the expectation that his foes would at-
tempt a vote of censure. As he anticipated, the ministers ap-
pointed a spokesman to present their charges, but when he

254 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

tried to speak, he was shouted down by a host of female
voices until Garrison in a magnificent gesture came forward
to demand that his opponent be heard. The convention
listened sullenly to the clerical complaints only to dismiss
them and hurriedly vote its confidence in the continued lead-
ership of William Lloyd Garrison. He had won the first trial
of strength in the Massachusetts Society and women had
made all the difference.

Meanwhile Sarah and Angelina Grimke returned to New
York and the anxious Weld. Angelina had decided that she
cared for him more than for the rights of women, and Sarah,
less sure of Weld's wisdom but devoted to her sister, acqui-
esced in Angelina's decision. In their year with Garrison the
sisters had ventured out on the sea of moral reform and
plumbed its depth to find in the murky currents beneath the
surface the hidden American prejudices against change. Garri-
son had proved a helpful guide if not an expert navigator. In
their turn the Grimkes had shown him that in the emotional
storms threatening his ship of reform women were valuable
shipmates.

The alliance between Garrison and American women was
hardly fortuitous. They knew in a way that men could not
know what it meant to be a slave, to live under the control
of another. This is what Angelina Grimke meant when she
said that men ought to be satisfied with the dominion they had
exercised for six thousand years "and that more true nobility
would be manifested by endeavoring to raise the fallen and
invigorate the weak than by keeping women in subjection."22
Women needed no elaborate train of reasoning to convince
them that slavery — the ownership of one person by another
— was inhuman, and that God had made no distinction be-
tween men and women as moral beings any more than he had
between black and white. They reasoned that whatever it

A WOMAN IN THE PULPIT 255

was morally right for a man to do it was right for a woman
to do. For this reason, many of the anti-slavery feminists like
the Grimkes and the Weston sisters did not bother with
proving the immorality of slavery — they felt it as a condi-
tion not far removed from their own. "What then can
woman do for the slave" Angelina Grimke asked, "when
she is herself under the feet of man and shamed into silence?"
For this reason too they responded to Garrison, whose
indictment of slavery was personal like their own. Garrison
also reacted to slavery experientially as a condition of de-
pendence which destroyed the human personality by sub-
jecting it to the will of another. His mother had attempted
such a hold on him, and he had grown to manhood in sub-
jection to her will. He too knew what it was to be owned.
More than once he attempted a philosophic analysis of slav-
ery but without success, for his real message remained simple
and direct — slavery was inhuman because it killed the soul.
This was the only argument he ever possessed. Every edi-
torial, every speech, every word he ever wrote or spoke on
the slavery question was a variation on this simple theme.
It was this theme that established his rapport with American
women and gave him the confidence he needed. Women
thrilled to his descriptions of the pure evil of slavery, and he
found in their response something which satisfied a deep need
in himself. Women offered him power.

The Politics of Perfection

IN NOVEMBER, 1837, Elijah Lovejoy was killed in Alton,
Illinois, while defending his abolitionist press from a mob,
and anti-slavery had its first real martyr. Garrison praised
Lovejoy's bravery in defending freedom of the press with
rifles, but he could not condone an act which threatened to
destroy his illusion of the peaceful nature of anti-slavery.
"We cannot ... in conscience delay the expression of our
regret, that our martyred coadjutor and his unfaltering friends
in Alton should have allowed any provocation, or personal
danger, or hope of victory, or distrust of the protection of
Heaven, to drive them to take up arms in self-defense. They
were not required to do so either as philanthropists or chris-
tians; and they have certainly set a dangerous precedent in
the maintenance of our cause."1 Boston held a protest meet-
ing in Faneuil Hall which was marked by the dramatic debut
of Wendell Phillips, who celebrated Lovejoy 's sacrifice and
likened him to the patriots in the American Revolution. The
appearance of Phillips as a full-fledged Garrisonian empha-
sized the growing appeal of anti-slavery for Boston gentlemen
and the need for a platform designed to exploit it. Garrison's
mind, however, was moving in the opposite direction.

Love joy's death raised the problem of combining anti-
slavery and nonresistance. How far were abolitionists obli-

THE POLITICS OF PERFECTION 257

gated to practice pacifism? Garrison had no clear-cut answer.
He assured his followers that he had no intention of con-
founding perfectionism and abolition or of making nonresist-
ance a test of anti-slavery character. "If any man shall affirm
that the anti-slavery cause, as such, or any anti-slavery society,
is answerable for our sentiments on this subject, to him may
be justly applied the apostolic declaration, 'the truth is not
in him.' " Yet it did seem that reformers were too "unsettled"
on the problem of peace and that it was time they declared
themselves. If they refused the right of self-defense to the
slave, how could they justify their own use of force? "And
if they conscientiously believe that the slaves would be guilt-
less in shedding the blood of the merciless oppressors, let them
say so unequivocally — for there is no neutral ground in this
matter, and the time is near when they will be compelled to
take sides."2 That time was nearer than he thought. The
"woman question," as he now called it, admitted of an easier
solution, since it was not an "irrelevant question" but one
which was "perfectly proper" to discuss. When he suggested
admitting women to the New England Anti-Slavery Conven-
tion, however, he found that a perfectly proper question
could also be a vexing one.

The New England Anti-Slavery Convention met in Boston
on May 28, 1838. At Garrison's suggestion the delegates
voted to invite women to become members, and over the
objections of the clergy who protested the innovation as
"injurious to the cause," they elected Abby Kelley, an out-
spoken feminist, to one of the standing committees. The next
day the Garrisonians invaded the annual meeting of William
Ladd's American Peace Society to save it from "belligerent
commanders, generals, colonels, majors, corporals and all."
The members of the Peace Society, who had been warned of
Garrison's intentions, decided to strike first by asserting the

258 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

right of defensive war, but their motion was swamped by
the invaders, who proceeded to pass their own resolution call-
ing for a new convention to overhaul the entire organization
and appointing a committee friendly to woman's rights and
nonresistance. On the following day he and his company
returned to the Marlboro' Chapel and the Anti-Slavery Con-
vention, where they named another committee to help draft
a call to the proposed peace convention. Once again women
were invited to participate. Thus were the twin causes of
nonresistance and woman's rights united in what their op-
ponents thought unholy matrimony.

All that summer Henry Wright held preparatory meetings
while Garrison publicized the forthcoming peace convention
in the Liberator. Their joint eiforts resulted in a meeting at
the Marlboro' Chapel on September 18, 1838, of one hun-
dred and sixty delegates, many of them radical abolitionists
of the Garrisonian stamp. In addition to Garrison, Henry
Wright and May, there was Wendell Phillips, an interested
spectator if hardly a pacifist, and Edmund Quincy, who also
had reservations about perfectionism but had come anyway.
At the first session Garrison moved quickly to seize control
of the convention. As the delegates began to answer the roll
call, he rose and with a dim smile suggested that each indi-
vidual write his or her name on a slip of paper, "thus mooting
the vexed Voman question' at the outset."3 There were a few
dark looks from the clergy, but no one challenged the motion
or the subsequent election of Abby Kelley to the business
committee. When the redoubtable Abby took the first oppor-
tunity to call one of her clerical brethren on a point of order,
however, the ministers realized the gravity of their mistake,
rose to request that their names be removed from the roll,
and hurriedly withdrew.

While the convention debated capital punishment, Garrison

THE POLITICS OF PERFECTION 259

was busy drafting a constitution and declaration of sentiments
for a Non-Resistance Society which would disavow all hu-
man government. "Never was a more 'fanatical' or 'disorgan-
izing' instrument penned by man," he boasted, adding that
after a "deep and lively sensation" among the delegates, it
was adopted by a vote of five to one. He neglected to add
that the original number of delegates had dwindled to less
than fifty and that only twenty-five of these were willing
to sign the document. "All who voted for it were abolition-
ists," he noted with satisfaction as though to prove the kin-
ship of anti-slavery and peace.

The handful of "ultra" abolitionists who signed Garrison's
Declaration of Sentiments of the Non-Resistance Society
witnessed one of the most extraordinary documents in the
history of American Adamic literature. "We cannot acknowl-
edge allegiance to any human government," the declaration
begins, "neither can we oppose any such government by a
resort to physical force. We recognize but one KING and
LAWGIVER, one JUDGE and RULER of mankind. We are bound
by the laws of a kingdom which is not of this world, the sub-
jects of which are forbidden to fight, in which Mercy and
Truth are met together, and Righteousness and Peace have
kissed each other. We register our testimony, not only against
all war, but against all preparation for war." Garrison denied
the right of self-defense to individuals as well as to nations.
Until the day when government renounced war the society
would withhold its allegiance. "As every human government
is upheld by physical strength, and its laws are enforced
virtually at the point of a bayonet, we cannot hold any office
which imposes upon its incumbent the obligation to compel
men to do right, on pain of imprisonment or death. We
therefore voluntarily exclude ourselves from every legislative
and judicial body, and repudiate all human politics, worldly

260 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

honors, and stations of authority/' Then came the gospel
justification for this "no-government" theory:

The history of mankind is crowded with evidences proving that
physical coercion is not adapted to moral regeneration; that the
sinful dispositions of men can be subdued only by love; that evil
can be exterminated from the earth only by goodness; that it
is not safe to rely upon an arm of flesh, upon man whose breath
is in his nostrils, to preserve us from harm; that there is great
security in being gentle, harmless, long-suif ering, and abundant
in mercy; that it is only the meek who shall inherit the earth, for
the violent who resort to the sword are destined to perish by the
sword* Hence, as a measure of sound policy — of safely to prop-
erty, life, and liberty — of public quietude and private enjoyment
— as well as on the ground of allegiance to HIM who is KING or
LO»B$, we cordially adopt the non-resistance principle; being
confident that it provides for all possible consequences, will en-
sure all things needful to us, is armed with omnipotent power,
and must ultimately triumph over every assailing force.4

Garrison's Biblical paraphrase, hastily composed and as
quickly adopted, proved too much for the judicious Edmund
Quincy, who with May insisted on the difference between
"the man-killing, God-defying rights of power" and the
"innocent functions of government." "I grant that the resort
to force is never to be had, but the injury to be submitted to
and forgiven," Quincy wrote to Garrison. "But the ordinary
and innocent business of life can no more be carried on with-
out these contrivances than it can without money."5 In his
view the cause of peace did not demand the sacrifice of com-
mon sense. Garrison airily dismissed his friend's objection and
insisted that his Declaration of Sentiments repudiated nothing
but the spirit of violence in thought, word, and deed. "What-
ever, therefore, may be done without provoking that spirit of

THE POLITICS OF PERFECTION 261

disinterested benevolence, is not touched or alluded to in the

instrument."6

This was hardly what his Declaration of Sentiments said,
but it reflected Garrison's real feelings about pacifism. None
of his arguments bore close scrutiny, since it was the idea of
moral commitment rather than the pkn of effective action
that concerned him. He prided himself on having "stirred up
a breeze" in the world of reform and found it gratifying that
"a few, obscure, moneyless unpretending men and women"
could have set New England on its ear. He hailed his own
achievement as possibly "the most important chapter in the
annals of Christianity." What did it matter that only twenty-
seven of the original one hundred and sixty members had the
courage to approve his work — "the progress of Christianity
through the world, since the time when only twelve persons
were found willing to take up its cross . . . should teach
. . . that it is of no consequence how many or how few
subscribed to the principles and doctrines of the Declara-

tion."7

William Ladd disowned the Non-Resistance Society as the
illegitimate offspring of good intentions and poor logic. It was
not simply the admission of women or the anti-Sabbatarian
views of the nonresistants that troubled him, though these
were bad enough, but the whole concept of perfection, that
fountain of Christian heresy which had poisoned the pro-
ceedings and watered the seeds of schism. "Many important
doctrines of the gospel," he warned, "may be pushed to ab-
surdity, with considerable plausibility."8 He could not doubt
Garrison's sincerity, but there was such a thing as going
beyond the millennium. He was content to stop there.

Garrison's harshest critic was Orange Scott, a Methodist
minister from Vermont who pointed out that the new organ-
ization was not simply a peace society but a "no-government"

262 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

sect devoted to the principles of civil disobedience. It simply
would not do for Garrison to argue that peace and anti-slavery
were totally unrelated, and then in the next breath boast that
all thoroughgoing nonresistants were also loyal abolitionists.
Such jumbling of the facts looked like an attempt to give
character and influence to the nonresistance scheme by mak-
ing it appear that the abolitionists favored it whereas most
of them considered civil government indispensable to their
cause. "Will you say," he asked Garrison, "but we trust in
God, and commit our all to him? As well might you trust in
God to edit and print your paper." What would have hap-
pened to him in the Boston riot if the mayor and his police
had not intervened? Besides, no one ever pretended that the
gospel of Christ contained all of the Christian message. Then
why this "new and loose theory"? "With your views, I can-
not conceive by what authority you appoint officers in your
society. They may not, indeed, enforce obedience by penal-
ties — but then the idea of office keeps up a distinction, which
your principles are calculated to level." How did Garrison
justify voting in state and national elections? How could he
recommend the use of petitions — "if you believe the very
existence of a legislative body to be sin, how can you connive
at its existence, by asking of it legislative action?" All institu-
tions, Scott concluded, must collapse before the perfectionist
repudiation of human government.9

In his reply Garrison struck back at a hostile world. Scott,
he announced, was a notoriously weak man who once had
supported the colonizationists. What right had he to speak
for anti-slavery? And what did his charge of anarchy mean?
The end of human government spelled not chaos but the
coming of a new order. When Scott objected to this "cheap
way of disposing of an argument" and withdrew from the
encounter, Garrison promptly dismissed Scott's retreat as

THE POLITICS OF PERFECTION 263

"tantamount to a confession, that he erred in judgment.''10
The abolitionist reaction against perfectionism continued
to spread both among the New England clergy and the
Executive Committee in New York, who foresaw disaster in
the abandonment of politics. Significantly, Garrison was more
concerned with Scriptural arguments than with the practical
objections of the Executive Committee. Reformers, he an-
nounced, mistook the divine purpose when they settled their
cause on any single passage in the Bible instead of the whole
of the gospel of Jesus, which taught total obedience to Christ.
"The present governments of the world are the consequence
of disobedience to the commands of God. But Christ came
to bring men back to obedience *by a new and living way/
When the cause is taken away, must not the effect cease?
. . . We are for subverting the rotten, unequal, anti-Christian
government of man, and establishing, as a substitute that which
is divine."11

Here enveloped in the language of the Second Great
Awakening stood revealed the American Dream. Garrison's
perfectionism was less a theory or doctrine than a faith in
beginning again, a belief in the "second chance." Dismissing
the complexities of the question of evil and promising eternal
goodness, it spurned the past for a perpetually renewable
innocence. His dream of personal holiness was thus an interior
version of the myth of the frontier. Stripped of its religious
terminology, perfectionism recounted the fable of the Amer-
ican Adam, the new man in the new world, free not merely
from Europe but from the burden of history. With its illu-
sion of total freedom it encouraged a dangerous moral posture
since it released the energies of a prophet — an Isaiah to the
nation — standing beyond time in subjection to God. Thus
the perfectionist myth contained the elements of personal and
social tragedy: personal tragedy in that it fostered an other-

264 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

worldliness that meant denying the reality of experience —
it left Garrison reborn but cast up on that childhood beach
of innocence, a beach of pure white but burning sands; social
tragedy in that it was the source of a profound disillusion-
ment. To regenerate the world Garrison invented the Ameri-
can saint and provided him with a power needed to make the
holy society, while the actual materials for his new world
were imperfect men who could understand moral ends but
not peaceful means.

In January, 1839, came the report that the conservative
wing of the Massachusetts Society was plotting to capture the
Board of Managers and dislodge the Garrisonians. They
planned to dispose of the "woman question" by refusing to
seat women delegates, and then establish control over the
Liberator and bring Garrison to account. Failing in this, they
agreed to walk out and form an organization of their own.
Quickly Garrison sounded the alarm and issued a call to all
his Unflinching and trusty friends" to save the Massachusetts
Society from a plot to wrest control from the founders. He
identified the ringleaders, all of them ministers, directed by
the formidable Amos Phelps, still a loyal abolitionist but a
stanch advocate of male supremacy disturbed by the prospect
of a host of feminine anarchists. The rebels, he knew, had
the support of the Executive Committee in New York. Ac-
cording to rumors filtering into the Liberator office the test
of strength would come over the question of establishing a
new paper under the control of the society. "How mean, how
ungrateful, how contemptible is conduct like this," Garrison
fumed. "I should not greatly care for it if it had openly
manifested itself — but everything about it has been managed
as secretly as possible." To counteract the revolutionary
movement he resorted to a stratagem of his own. He waited
until Phelps left Boston on business and then hurriedly called

THE POLITICS OF PERFECTION 265

a meeting of the Board of Managers where he suggested pub-
lishing a monthly periodical as the official organ of the Massa-
chusetts Society. To give the appearance of impartiality the
board appointed the absent Phelps to the committee along
with Garrison and his henchman Quincy.

Garrison reported the results to George Benson. "It hap-
pened that he [Phelps] did not return in season from Haver-
hill to consult with us, and we accordingly made our report
to the Board ... to wit, that such a monthly ought to be
printed, officially, to be called cThe Abolitionist,' and to be
edited by a committee of three, to be elected by ballot. This
report was strenuously opposed by Mr- P's friend (Ayres) on
the ground that a weekly paper was called for, and would
doubtless be established — that it would be better to defer the
whole matter to the annual meeting. . . . The report was,
however, accepted, and Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy
and myself were elected editors."12 He had won the first
round.

Meanwhile his opponents had drafted a series of resolutions
which they lofted as trial balloons at local meetings through-
out the state. The first of these was aimed directly at Garri-
son's perfectionism: it deckred it the duty of every abolition-
ist "not to content himself with merely refusing to vote for
any man who is opposed to the emancipation of the slaver
but to go to the polls and throw his vote for some man known
to favor it." A second provided that where an abolitionist
had no obvious choice between two candidates of opposing
parties, "then he is equally bound to go to the polls, and vote
for some true man in opposition to them both, and to do all
he can, lawfully, to defeat their election." Both resolutions
were aimed at the practice of "scattering" votes which Garri-
son had recommended in cases where there was not a distinct
choice between candidates. A third resolution struck at the

266 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

independence of the Liberator without naming it: "Resolved,
That a weekly and ably conducted anti-slavery paper, which
shall take right, high, and consistent ground on this subject,
and constantly urge abolitionists, as in duty bound, to use
their political, as well as their moral and religious, power and
rights for the immediate overthrow of slavery, is now greatly
needed in Massachusetts. . . ,"13 These resolutions were
passed at meetings in Fitchburg and in Fall River, where the
Bristol County Anti-Slavery Society added a fourth resolu-
tion calling on the Board of Managers to establish an inde-
pendent paper as soon as possible.

As the annual meeting approached, both sides rallied their
forces and began counting their votes. As usual, Garrison
overestimated the strength of his enemies. "My belief is," he
wrote to George Benson, "that they will manage the affair
with so much plausibility, and will have so many able and
influential speakers on their side, as to be able to carry their
point."14 If they failed, they would surely secede; if they
triumphed, it would be a dark hour for the cause.

The annual meeting held in the Marlboro' Chapel on
January 23, 1839, was the largest and the stormiest in the
history of the society. In the chair sat Francis Jackson, the
Boston merchant, benefactor and personal friend of Garrison.
All of the members of the supposed cabal were present in-
cluding Stanton, who carried the burden of the attack. Garri-
son had rounded up a sizable delegation of Boston's free
Negroes and an even larger collection of women. First on the
agenda came the reading of Garrison's annual report, which
was heavily freighted with criticism of his opponents; but
before the insurgents could assail it, Wendell Phillips moved
the immediate consideration of the so-called Fitchburg Reso-
lutions. The insurgents opened the debate with a long and
involved indictment. Then Henry Stanton took the floor

THE POLITICS OF PERFECTION 267

and directed his attack at the "nullifying effects" of per-
fectionism on anti-slavery and the use of the Liberator to
spread this heresy. "It is not that other subjects are intro-
duced into the Liberator" he protested, " — it is that such
other subjects are introduced — subjects so injurious to the
cause." Garrison's peace views might or might not prove
correct, but there was no doubt that they had lowered the
standard of abolition.15

In his reply Garrison resorted to an old trick: to every
one of Stanton's charges he opposed new questions. Why
had Stanton waited so long to break silence? Why had he
joined the "sectarian party" in the first place — to destroy
anti-slavery or merely to discredit veterans like himself? Who
could prove that the Liberator hurt the cause? Where was
the man who could deny his devotion to the slave? When
Stanton tried to interrupt, his complaints were drowned out
by roars and cheers which, Garrison boasted, "spoke more
eloquently and sincerely than the tongue of men ever did."
But Stanton was not one to give up easily. "Let me ask him
a question," he demanded of the audience. "Mr. Garrison,
do you or do you not believe it a sin to go to the polls?" After
some hesitation Garrison answered, "Sin for me!" Stanton
repeated the question and again came the same answer —
it was a sin for all nonresistance men to vote and thereby
recognize the claims of "carnal" government. Beyond this
point Garrison would not go. Stanton could not get him to
commit himself on the duty of other abolitionists or to admit
that there was a conflict between nonresistance and abolition.

In fact, Garrison did not need to bother with arguments.
He had the votes and soon put them to work. Stanton offered
a resolution which had technically been under consideration
from the outset — "That every member of an anti-slavery so-
ciety who refuses, under any pretext, thus to act morally or

268 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

politically, or counsels others to such a course, is guilty of
gross inconsistency, and widely departs from the original
and fundamental principles of the anti-slavery enterprise."
This resolution, along with the other Fitchburg proposals,
was indefinitely postponed by an overwhelming vote. When
Charles' Torrey and Alanson St. Glair questioned the legality
of a vote which included "female members," Francis Jack-
son rescued the Garrisonians by ruling without appeal that
it was in order for women to vote. Stanton's terse account
of the episode in a letter to Birney told the story of the first
•day's combat. "Garrison found himself pushed to the wall
on the non-government question, and with his train bands,
he made a desperate push to sway the Society over to his
nonresistance views. He succeeded."16

The climax came on the afternoon of the next day when
one of the ministers managed to make himself heard long
enough to introduce a milder version of Stanton's original
resolution, simply declaring it the imperious duty of every
abolitionist who could conscientiously do so to go to the
polls. In the course of an angry quarrel that followed Stanton
reminded Garrison that in 1834 he had supported Amasa
Walker for Congress and had lectured some of his colored
supporters now present on the need to vote. "It is false!"
Garrison shouted. Stanton, not to be caught unawares, pulled
out a sheaf of quotations from the Liberator and requested
the right to read them. By now Garrison knew he was
trapped, and so did his followers, for they refused to allow
Stanton to proceed. The next moment they accepted Garri-
son's counterresolution providing that "those abolitionists who
feel themselves called upon, by a sense of duty, to go to the
polk, and yet purposely absent themselves from the polls
whenever an opportunity is presented to vote for a friend of
die slave — or who, when there, follow their party predilec-

THE POLITICS OF PERFECTION 269

tions to the abandonment of their abolition principles — are
recreant to their high professions, and unworthy of the
name they bear." Then the convention voted, 180 to 24, to
accept Garrison's annual report, which advocated woman's
rights, censured the clerical party in Massachusetts, recom-
mended nonresistance, and criticized political action.

"The Board deny that it is competent for any anti-slavery
society by its votes or through its organs, to arraign either
the political or religious views of its members." Such was the
conclusion to Garrison's annual report. "It may with no
more propriety decide that one man is morally bound to cast
a vote at the polls, than that another man is morally bound to
unite himself to a church." On the subject of political action,
he declared, there were many conflicting opinions; all that
any society might rightfully do, therefore, was to entreat its
members to abide by their principles. No organization pos-
sessed coercive power over its membership. With this provi-
sion Garrison fastened to abolition a new orthodoxy while
posing as the defender of minority rights. The Massachusetts
Society was now his, but in winning control of it he had
stripped it of eifective power. "But the point is," Stanton
remarked dolefully to Birney, "the Society hauled down its
flag and run [sic] up the crazy banner of the non-govern-
ment heresy, and we had to rally around or be ostracized."
Yet even he had to admire the ease with which Garrison had
crushed the revolt though he admitted that "the split is wide
and can never be closed up."

Defeated in Boston, the insurgents appealed to the Execu-
tive Committee in New York, which was busy with its
own problems. The split in the Massachusetts Society was
only part of the gradual deterioration of the fabric of
American anti-slavery in the year 1839. There were a number
of causes for the loss of power and prestige of the national

2J& THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

organization. First of all, revivals and the spirit of Christian
reform were on the wane. When the national society was
founded, revivalism had been at its peak; in 1839, following
a depression and a conservative reaction against perfectionist
theology, the churches were withdrawing their support from
reform enterprises and interdenominational cooperation was
disappearing. Then, too, sectional politics and the civil
liberties issue publicized the work of the society but at the
cost of a national program with national goals. By 1839 the
American Anti-Slavery Society was only a name. Still an-
other reason for the decline of the national society was the
petition strategy which called for decentralizing control and
dispersing functions to local societies. The money to run
these societies was being kept at home. As the competition for
funds grew sharper, the national society gradually lost con-
trol of money-raising within the states until by 1838 every
state auxiliary had closed its territory to the society's agents.
In Massachusetts, where Garrison's heresies aggravated the
financial difficulty, the state society forced the Executive
Committee to accept a system of voluntary pledges and then
neglected to fill its own quota. It was obvious that the Garri-
sonians, hostile to political action and displeased with inter-
ference from New York, had no intention of meeting their
obligations until they could control the national society. Ac-
cordingly, in February, 1839, the committee decided to force
the issue by notifying the Massachusetts Board of Managers
of its intention to drop the quota system and send its own
agents back into the state. Straightway Garrison sensed a
challenge to his independence and dispatched Wendell Phil-
lips to New York to kill the project. "You will see by the last
Liberator" he wrote, "that a collision has taken place be-
tween the New York Executive Committee and our Board.
How it will terminate I know not. This is a sad spectacle to

THE POLITICS OF PERFECTION 271

present to the enemies of our holy cause; but be the responsi-
bility upon the heads of those who are attempting to lord it
over the consciences of the nonresisting abolitionists."17

He quickly dropped the posture of self-defense when the
Executive Committee sent Stanton and Lewis Tappan to ar-
gue its case before the quarterly meeting of the Massachu-
setts Society in March. Once again he laid his plans carefully,
assembling his partisans from all over the state and assuring
them that the meeting would decide "whether our sacred
enterprise shall continue under the management of its old
friends, or be given up to the control of politicians and

sectaries."18

Tappan and Stanton came prepared to discuss more than
finances. In February a prospectus had circulated in Massa-
chusetts which announced that a new abolitionist newspaper
was "imperiously demanded." The members of the Executive
Committee now hoped to bring Garrison to terms by threat-
ening to support the project. Their hopes were short-lived.
Garrison and his lieutenants had done their work so well
that on the test vote over the proposal to ignore the new rul-
ing of the Executive Committee the New Yorkers were
soundly beaten, 142 to 23. The Executive Committee now
knew what it had long suspected, that Garrison could not
be beaten in Massachusetts and that their only hope was a
new state society. This was precisely the conclusion already
reached by Garrison's conservative opponents in Massachu-
setts, all of whom were ready for a "new organization," as
they called it. Henry Stanton and Elizur Wright stood ready
to help them reorganize abolition there on a political basis.
Cheered by these reports of dissatisfaction with Garrison,
the members of the Executive Committee looked forward to
a new order in Massachusetts which would help sustain the
old cause. Before their hopes were realized Garrison and his

272 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

forces raided their New York headquarters and almost seized
command of their society.

Of the one hundred and eighteen Massachusetts delegates
to the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society
in May, Garrison controlled nearly three-fourths. He brought
with him all his lieutenants — Phillips, Loring, Oliver John-
son, Henry Wright, Samuel Philbrick, Edmund Quincy, and
a newcomer named John A. Collins, together with three
women, Abby Kelley, Thankful Southwick and Anne War-
ren Weston. These he counted on to keep the faithful in line.
Ten additional votes from Rhode Island and a sprinkling from
Vermont gave him nearly a hundred votes in New England
alone. This number, added to his strength among the Pennsyl-
vania Quakers and upstate New York delegates, could con-
ceivably give him a majority in the convention, especially if
his women supporters were allowed to vote. It was not sur-
prising, then, that the very first issue confronting the four
hundred and thirty-five delegates was the motion put by the
opponents of woman's rights that aour roll call be made up,
according to former usage, and men, duly appointed, shall
constitute the roll." Not until the afternoon of the next day,
after twelve hours of bickering, did the crucial vote come on
the following proposition: "Resolved that the roll of this
meeting be made by placing thereon the names of all persons,
male and female, who are delegates from any auxiliary
society. " With roughly one-quarter of the delegates' votes
not recorded, the resolution was adopted by a vote of 180
to 140. A breakdown of the voting (see top of next page)
showed where Garrison's strength lay.

Garrison promptly set his delegation to work. At his
suggestion they appointed a special committee to make recom-
mendations to the Executive Committee. The special com-
mittee quickly urged reconsideration of all the passages in

THE POLITICS OF PERFECTION 273

Ayes Nays

Maine i 6

New Hampshire i 5

Vermont 5 4

Massachusetts 72 25

Rhode Island 10 i

Connecticut 14 1 1

New York 45 76

New Jersey 9 ^

Pennsylvania 21 7

Delaware — i

Ohio 2 —

Illinois — 2

TOTAL 1 80 I4019

the annual report dealing unfavorably with political action.
Then he presented a resolution to the general meeting which
declared that "in the original formation of this society, it
was not contemplated, nor is it now desired to exclude from its
membership any persons, on account of their being pre-
vented by conscientious scruples, from participating in all
the measures which the mass of the society either originally
or subsequently, may have contemplated for the advancement
of the Anti-Slavery cause."20

The leadership of the political abolitionists in the society
had fallen to the taciturn, hard-driving James Birney, now its
secretary and chief polemicist. For some time Birney had
contemplated shifting the anti-slavery cause from religious
to political grounds, and now he rallied his supporters to
meet the perfectionist challenge. Garrison's calculated piece
of ckculocution somehow survived the attacks of Birney,
but he was unable to defeat his rival's counterproposal maMng
k the duty of every abolitionist to vote. Birney's resolution

2y* THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

was passed by a vote of 84 to 77 only after many of the
Garrisonians, worn out by the four-day wrangle, had re-
turned to Boston. He was still strong enough, however, to
defeat a proposal for sending a money-raising expedition to
England. His motives were made clear later in the spring
when the New England Convention voted to send Wendell
Phillips on a similar mission. The real victory, however, lay
in the admission of women. He still lacked the votes to man-
age a repudiation of politics, but if he returned next year
with enough women delegates, the story might well be
different.

The final act of the drama opened two weeks later at
the New England Convention, where a handful of conserva-
tive diehards made one last attempt to settle with him. Once
more the woman question was introduced by Phelps and
quickly disposed of by the Garrisonians. Weary from months
of fruitless campaigning, Phelps and Company withdrew to
form their own organization, the Massachusetts Abolition
Society, whose unofficial motto read "For Men Only." After
they left, the Garrisonians pronounced the formation of the
new society "inexpedient" and "hostile to the genius of aboli-
tion"; declared that the constitution of the national society,
contrary to Birney's elaborate demonstration, did not enjoin
voting; and closed their session after refusing a peace con-
ference with the secessionists.21

The Massachusetts Abolition Society was formed for the
ostensible purpose of freeing anti-slavery from its encum-
brances—perfectionism, nonresistance, and woman's rights
— but it was only the last of these heresies on which the new
society could agree. The politically minded members of the
Executive Committee in New York waited for a sign of life
in the new organization only to find that the society was
first and last an anti-Garrison society. However notorious

THE POLITICS OF PERFECTION 275

their former leader had become by 1839, he still embodied
the spirit of abolition in New England and could marshal
the supporters to prove it. Eventually any group opposed to
him would have to stand on a political platform. Such was the
conclusion already reached by Birney and his friends, who
now sought to instruct the Massachusetts Abolition Society
in the duties of voting. In an all-out attack on the "no-
government" heretics Birney leveled his sights on the vote.
How could abolitionists influence politics except by voting?
What was the sense in petitioning Congress to abolish slavery
and then refusing to elect men who would begin the work?
How could Garrison oppose political action and still claim
to be an abolitionist? Better that he withdraw from the society
and seek the destruction of law and order elsewhere.22

Garrison professed himself shocked with Birney's "truth-
less, slanderous, cruel" accusations — "caricatures of the
pacific precepts of the Gospel — phantasms of a distorted im-
agination." He particularly objected to the phrase "no-govern-
ment" because the nonresistants, he asserted, held religiously
to a government of heaven if not of men. He proceeded to
make the dubious distinction between petitions and the vote
on the grounds that petitions involved influencing a legislative
body already in existence, while voting meant creating that
body. Nonresistants could uphold the right of petition, there-
fore, and still refuse to vote. The founders of the American
Society, he asserted, at no time intended to make voting a
duty, and Birney's remark that he himself had voted for
Amasa Walker not five years ago was entirely beside the
point. "I humbly conceive that it concerns no man, or body
of men, to know how many or how few times I have voted
since the adoption of the A.S. Constitution, or whether I
have, or have not, changed my views of politics within a
few years." Birney would do better to prove his own case

276 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

first. Suddenly, in a bewildering contradiction, he said that
he expected to see political action strengthened and purified
"in exact proportion to the prevalence of the great conserva-
tive doctrines of nonresistance." Perfectionism would work to
pour new lifeblood into the veins of abolition — "to give it
extraordinary vigor — to clothe it with new beauty — to in-
spire it with holier feelings — to preserve it from corruption
— though not necessarily connected with it." If Birney failed
to fathom his reasoning let him be silent until he could!

At this point William Goodell, now the editor of the
Friend of Man, joined the debate. Like Birney, he failed to
see how Garrison's nonresistance could free the slave. On
the contrary, he was convinced that perfectionism unwittingly
pkyed into die hands of its enemies. By refusing to vote, the
Garrisonians only strengthened the hold of the Whig and
Democratic parties. In their leader's nonsensical doctrines
radical and reactionary extremes joined to thwart the at-
tempt of intelligent abolitionists to wipe out slavery with the
vote.

To counter Goodell's charge Garrison was forced to re-
sort to the doctrine of minority rights. There never would
have been any trouble, he explained, if the political aboli-
tionists had not tried to proscribe the nonresistants. He cared
very little for the resolutions which conflicted with his own
view of politics; but he would never fail to protest against
any and every attempt to make the anti-slavery movement an
"engine of despotism" subservient to the commands of cleri-
cal politicians and sectarian bigots. Far from encouraging
corrupt politics, the nonresistants were greatly pleased to see
that men who had hitherto been spellbound by the sorcery
of political formulas were finally casting independent votes.
"We feel a high respect for such men: such conduct leads
us to Imps for still better fruits." After all, the difference

THE POLITICS OF PERFECTION 277

between abolitionists and nonresistants was only one of
degree: the abolitionists aimed at freeing the Negro, non-
resistants at delivering the whole world. Let nonresistance
prevail and instead of having to go through a long and slow
process of electioneering to find the right men to free the
slaves — "instead of having to wait weeks and months until
the question of repeal has been discussed" — judges, legisla-
tors and all the people would immediately "show their deeds"
and confess, "and bring all the statute books togethery and
burn them before all men."23 The old vision of a righteous
but jealous God still haunted him, a God who needed not
man with his petty contrivances. As once with the house of
Israel, the Lord would covenant with the American people
and inscribe His laws in their minds, His commands in their
hearts.

In the summer of 1839 the reaction against Garrison
deepened. The Massachusetts Abolition Society began to
send its agents to local and county conventions, and several
times Garrison had to dispatch a contingent of Bostonians
to deal with the invaders. At a National Abolition Conven-
tion held in Albany in July he was outvoted both on non-
resistance and woman's rights and presented with the title
"prince of disorganizes." Then the Executive Committee
in New York pronounced its sentence of excommunication.
In a circular sent to its agents and auxiliaries the committee
announced that their society, "recognizing the rightful power
and binding obligation of the government to interpose its
arm for the delivery of the slave based its plans of operation
upon the Imvfulness of political action. . . * But, within a few
months past, a sentiment has been promulgated in oui: ranks*
maintained too, by some who have been among our earliest
and most efficient friends, denying die rightfulness of all
human government, and consequently denying it to be a

278 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

duty to vote for men to be rulers who will employ the
prerogatives of government for the abolition of slavery. The
Anti-Slavery Society can afford no countenance to such
doctrines."24

While Garrison was busy fending off his critics, a group
of abolitionists under the leadership of Myron Holley, the
anti-slavery editor of the Rochester Freeman, met in Cleve-
land to consider his proposition to nominate a third ticket
for the next Presidential election. When his proposal was
defeated, Holley returned to New York to call a local con-
vention at Warsaw, where he won over enough advocates of
political action to nominate Birney and Dr. Julius LeMoyne
on an anti-slavery ticket. The third party movement was
under way.

The Executive Committee was badly split on the question
of political action. On the one hand, Elizur Wright and
Joshua Leavitt wholeheartedly favored the idea of an aboli-
tionist political party. Stanton and Birney, while they were
committed to the vote, doubted that a third party could
succeed. On their side, Lewis Tappan, Weld, and Gamaliel
Bailey, the editor of the Philanthropist, vehemently opposed
the idea of a third party devoted entirely to abolition. Thus
Garrison was not alone in assailing the third party move-
ment in the autumn of 1839, and much of his ammunition
was supplied by Western abolitionists who still thought as
he did.

Immediate help from the West came from a different
source. In November he received a letter written from
Holley's Cleveland convention which referred to a "con-
fidential" communication from Elizur Wright to Henry
Stanton. The unknown spy quoted excerpts from the pur-
loined letter in which Wright complained of the wretched
mismanagement of the Massachusetts Abolition Society.

THE POLITICS OF PERFECTION 279

Wright had come to Massachusetts to edit the new society's
paper, the Abolitionist, and already was proving more than
an editorial match for Garrison. But Wright was discouraged
by the apathy of the Massachusetts Abolition Society, which
was so concerned with Garrison's heresies that it was neglect-
ing the slavery question. In his letter to Stanton in Cleveland
he said he hoped the convention would take "a decided step
towards Presidential candidates." "Our labor will be more
than half lost without them/' he continued. "The South can
outbid us, and hence she will buy up both political parties,
as to national politics, ad infinitum" If the abolitionist candi-
dates were of "good stuff," the whole cause would gain
regardless of the number of votes they won. Then Wright
turned to the situation in Massachusetts. "One thing / know.
Unless you do take such a step, OUR NEW ORGANIZATION HERE
is A GONE CASE. It has been, inter nos, SHOCKINGLY MIS-
MANAGED. Everything has been made to turn upon the
woman question. The political has been left to fall out of
sight." It would not do for Massachusetts, under the cir-
cumstances, to make the first move, which would have to
come from the national society, and very soon. "You cer-
tainly see this," Wright reminded Stanton in conclusion.
"Take my solemn assurance that IT is LIFE AND DEATH WITH

us."25

Garrison saw the value of the "pilfered letter," as Wright
called it, in discrediting the new state society. He demanded
that Wright divulge its contents, and when Wright did so
in the pages of the Abolitionist, he copied it for his own
readers. "Ordinarily," he explained in his remarks, "private
correspondence should be considered sacred; but not when
... it is found to relate not to particular persons, but to
a great public enterprise, involving the rights and liberties
of millions of the human race." Wright, he lamented, was

280 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

sadly altered and his newspaper lost to all principle. To
follow him and the Massachusetts Abolition Society would be
to descend to the depths of debased and venal bargainings.
"The pseudo-Abolition Society must go down 'to vile dust
from whence it sprang, Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.' "2e
His editorial was both judgment and prophecy: without
needed support from the politicians, the Massachusetts Aboli-
tion Society died quietly while the Liberator, with a thou-
sand new subscriptions, continued to play the politics of no-
government.

15.

Triumph of the Saints

THE YEAR 1840 brought disillusion to the abolitionists
and disaster to their organization. Garrison's decision
to capture the national society split the anti-slavery coalition
into two warring factions, neither of which was able to -mus-
ter the manpower or find the funds to keep the militant anti-
slavery spirit of the Thirties alive. His enemies, embittered
by the coup cFetat, abandoned the society to discover in the
light of reappraisal that their objective lay in politics and the
vote. When the smoke of battle lifted over the annual meet-
ing of 1840, Garrison found himself in control of an organiza-
tion that had lost half its personnel and all its power, an
instrument useful now only as a sounding board for his dis-
sonant prophecies of Armageddon.

Disorder also ruled the domestic scene as Garrison's
debts kept pace with his growing family. His second son,
William, was born in 1838, and another son, Wendell, two
years later. In September, 1839, he rented a house in Cam-
bridgeport, "very neat in its appearance," though hardly
more spacious than the Boston quarters. Yet it was cheap —
two hundred and fifty dollars a year — a factor that weighed
heavily with him. His ever-faithful man Friday, Oliver
Johnson, concerned as always for the welfare of his chief,
promised to board with them and help repair the family

282 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

budget; but the pile of unpaid bills kept reminding Garri-
son of the chaotic state of his finances. "At present, I am
greatly embarrassed for want of money," he confessed to
George Benson. One hundred and fifty dollars of his salary
was still owing, and the Massachusetts Society had yet to
pay him his expenses for the current year* The cost of moving
and furnishing the new house had drained the last of his
resources. To meet immediate expenses he borrowed a
hundred dollars from Francis Jackson and another hundred
from Samuel Philbrick, the retired Quaker merchant and
abolitionist. "They will expect ine to fulfill my word," he
explained to Benson. "My object in writing to you is to know
whether you can borrow that amount for me, so as to give
me more time to 'turn myself.' "a He never doubted that the
Lord would provide, but it seemed sometimes that He was an
unconscionably long time getting around to it.

Part of the borrowed money went to care for his brother.
After twenty years at sea James had suddenly appeared in the
Boston Navy Yard, still an alcoholic and now mortally ill
with cancer of the spine. Garrison secured a leave of absence
for him and set about getting him discharged from the Navy,
an unpleasant job that involved asking favors of Congress-
man Caleb Gushing. Gushing proved helpful, however, and
"poor James" was released and came home to Cambridge-
port. At Lloyd's suggestion he began writing his memoirs,
a nightmarish account of his boyhood fall from grace and
his years aboard ships of the line in the United States Navy.
His descriptions of the inhumanity aboard ship and on the
beach — of tyrannical officers and drunken fights, floggings
and depravity — present a remarkable picture of life in the
nineteenth-century American Navy. Also at his brother's
urgingi James filled his confession with a bitter reflection
on the "Fatal Poison." "That I am a doomed man is certain,

TRIUMPH OF THE SAINTS 283

and can not avoid Fate," he admitted, adding perhaps for
Lloyd's benefit, "and none but God, and my self, can tell
what I have suffered in body and in mind for my rashness."

Life with his virtuous brother must have been hard for
James, who found the abolitionists' unctuous manners and
"stentorian lungs" too much for his liking. Lloyd expected
gratitude, and James tried hard to be grateful for the op-
pressive kindliness and the sermonizing. Helen he came to love
deeply before he died, and perhaps it was she who reconciled
him to the misery of his last two years. Lloyd, his memories
of boyhood already dim, saw only a pathetic example of the
evils of liquor in his wasted brother. "Earnest is my prayer
to God, that he may be led to review his past life," he wrote
to his wife, "and to perceive how widely he has departed
from the path of rectitude, to the ruin of his immortal soul."2
Repentance and reconciliation — the old prescription for
salvation. James, in his turn, might have prescribed humility
for his brother.

The financial troubles of the Liberator were solved tem-
porarily by terminating Knapp's contract as printer. Knapp
was inefficient and had lately taken to drink, but he was also
an original partner who had helped sustain the paper through
seven lean years. Over his protests the Board of Managers
appointed a committee consisting of Francis Jackson, Ellis
Gray Loring, Edmund Quincy, and Samuel Philbrick to
come to terms with him and henceforth manage the finances.
After a consultation with Garrison the committee decided
to pay Knapp one hundred and fifty dollars. Knapp not
unnaturally made his grievances known to the whole aboli-
tionist community, for he reasoned that Garrison was aban-
doning a friend to save his paper. Garrison suffered few
qualms of conscience. "To say that I separated from my friend
Knapp with great reluctance and pain of mind — that I

284 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

exerted myself to the utmost to retain him as printer of the
Liberator — that I greatly compassionated his forlorn condi-
tion, and did everything in his behalf that friendship and
sympathy could suggest — is simply to assert the truth, which
all my friends in this quarter know full well/'3 For those who
preferred it, Knapp's version was available for the asking.

The year 1840 opened on a "political gulf that yawns to
devour."4 In western New York the political abolitionists
were driving toward the formation of a third party. In New
York City the Executive Committee was preparing to close
up shop and turn the direction of the movement over to its
auxiliaries. Some of the New York group, Leavitt, Stanton,
and Birney, were ready to join forces with the third party
men upstate. It seemed to Garrison that only the Massachu-
setts Society remained loyal to the old cause of moral suasion.

His friend and chief adviser Henry Wright, who was
scouting abolitionist activities in western New York with
one eye on the millennium and the other on scheming poli-
ticians, warned of the coming "desperate struggle for political
power" at the spring meeting of the national society and ad-
vised him "to exert all your influence in Connecticut and
Rhode Island to get delegates to New York in May."5 Garri-
son took his advice and spent the early spring making the
circuit of local and county conventions, submitting resolu-
tions that bristled with hostility to church and state. At a
meeting in Lynn in March he gave an indication of how far
he was prepared to go by submitting two resolutions which
were passed without dissent.

Resolved, That Freedom and Slavery are natural and irreconcil-
able enemies; that it is morally impossible for them to endure to-
gether in the same nation; and that the existence of the one can
only be secured by the destruction of the other.

TRIUMPH OF THE SAINTS 285

Resolved, That slavery has exercised a pernicious and most
dangerous influence in the affairs of this Union from its founda-
tion to the present time; that this influence has increased, is in-
creasing, and cannot be destroyed, except by the destruction of
slavery or the Union.0

Meanwhile the advocates of a third party were completing
their plans for independent nominations. At Albany on the
first day of April a convention called by Myron Holley and
Gerrit Smith agreed on the Presidential ticket of Birney and
Thomas Earle, the Pennsylvania Quaker. It was a small
beginning: the Albany Convention numbered only one hun-
dred and twenty delegates, of whom one hundred and four
were from western New York. Even then, the vote to nomi-
nate a ticket had been surprisingly close — 44 to 33. Never-
theless, the call to "unite patriots, philanthropists and Chris-
tians, to put down the slavery of all parries, and put up the
principles of the Declaration of Independence, at the ballot
box" was a challenge Garrison had to meet.7

Reviewing the rise of the third party movement, he was
sure he discerned a pattern. The trouble began when Stanton
and Birney decided to build a party engine for their own
selfish purposes. They had worked their mischief in Massa-
chusetts until his loyal abolitionists rallied to rout them.
Defeated there, they retired to the West, where they in-
veigled Holley into calling the Albany Convention. The final
step would be a desperate push at the annual meeting in
New York to convert the parent society into a political
party. This he had to prevent at all costs.

He began by examining the philosophy of the third party
movement. Gerrit Smith, one of its leaders, argued that since
neither the Whig nor the Democratic Party could be purged
of its pro-slavery elements, abolitionists were forced to
create one of their own. Garrison replied with a curious

286 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

analogy. There was no more reason, he said, for "a war of
extermination" against the two existing parties than for one
against Methodism or Unitarianism. "If we must have a new
political party to abolish slavery, must we not also have a
new religious sect for the same purpose? . . ." American
politics needed new men, not new labels; Christian voters,
not party hacks. In voting for an enlightened abolitionist
without regard to party labels the anti-slavery contingent
did all that was required. Just how abolitionists could secure
nominations in parties openly hostile to them he did not
say.

The work of explaining nonresistant perfectionism was
made doubly difficult by his inability to think through to
logical conclusions. In the first place, he was not a thorough-
going nonresistant, as two recent examples clearly showed.
The Massachusetts Militia Law exempted only Quakers and
provided a fine for anyone else who failed to train at the
annual muster. When his friends asked his opinion on the
propriety of paying the fine, he said that he saw no reason
"why a military fine may not be paid, as well as any other
exacted by a government based on force." "If I refuse to bear
arms — if I will not procure a substitute — if I bear an open
and uncompromising testimony against the military system
— I do all, in my opinion, that is required by Christianity."8
Principle need not prevent a sensible accommodation. Then
when the legislature opened up the liquor traffic by repealing
die Massachusetts License Law, he fought the repeal and
even proposed a new and more stringent regulation. Civil law
had its uses even for a millenarian.

As the third party movement gathered momentum in the
spring of 1840, criticism of Garrison increased. Some of the
political abolitionists accused him of secretly favoring Harri-
son. Others hurled gibes at "that fellow," as Gamaliel Bailey

TRIUMPH OF THE SAINTS 287

called him, "with his troop of males and females." William
Goodell, now thoroughly convinced of his old friend's ruth-
less will to power, composed a satire entitled Hoix to Make
a Pope. Take an ardent and strong-minded leader, Goodell
said, surround him with unquestioning friends, and soon the
belief will spread that he is infallible. So it had been with the
bishops of Rome and so it was now with William Lloyd
Garrison.

Garrison's reply was An Address to the Abolitionists of
the United States, commissioned by the Massachusetts Society
and circulated as a warning to tried-and-true abolitionists to
disregard the Albany Convention. "The call is presumptuous,
comes from no authority, and should receive general con-
demnation." It was evident, he continued, that there was a
"small but talented" body of restless men in western New
York who were determined to form a third party with the
hope of being lifted by it into office. Whether theirs was
a desire for political spoils or simply an error in judgment,
the damage to the anti-slavery cause was the same. "Let us
not sanction a precedent, which shall encourage, nay author-
ize a few irresponsible individuals at any time to appoint a
national gathering of abolitionists, as it may suit their caprice
or ambition, in order to promote some selfish or local pur-
pose."9 Elizur Wright quickly retaliated with a blast at the
Board of Managers of the Massachusetts Society for hiding
behind their roaring giant. Garrison countered by impeach-
ing Wright as a trimmer and dismissing his paper as a travesty.
On and on raged the battle of epithets.

Already there were signs of disaffection in New England.
In Maine the state society came out for political action; and
in western Massachusetts, where the Whigs were traditionally
strong, anti-slavery men began to look to the party for
leadership. Garrison lashed out at the politicians. Moral

i88 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

suasion, he cried, had always worked in the past — why
abandon it now? "Yes, blessed be God, it can be done, in
His name, and by the power of his truth! "10 He was preaching
to the converted: not many abolitionists outside his own
bailiwick could be convinced of the "depravity" of politi-
cal abolition or the "Machiavellism" of its leaders. As
though he realized the weakness of his case against a third
party, he dwelt on the futility of political plans and advised
his followers not to concern themselves with the forthcoming
election. It was possible, he admitted, but not likely that a
change in administration would prove helpful, and anyway,
the abolitionists were powerless to decide the matter. "Their
great and only concern should be, to revolutionize the public
sentiment of the land by truth and light; and having done this,
they will have accomplished the overthrow of slavery."11
The task of actually freeing the slaves he would leave to
others, but not to those "unprincipled" abolitionists who
needed the franchise in order to keep from walking crook-
edly, nor to ambitious schemers who wanted to be elected
to office. Such men lacked faith in God and the simple in-
strumentalities which He had adopted for the suppression
of evil in the world. If moral suasion had multiplied ten
thousand efficient societies in eight years, who knew what
the future held? "A little can and will leaven the whole
lump."12

But what then? How were the people to show their dis-
approval of slavery except by voting it down? Just what did
he want the American people to do? His silence suggested
that he opposed the third party movement because he knew
he could not control it, because he saw a day coming when
abolitionists would cease to listen to him. This fear, his
critics reasoned, lay behind his decision to take over the
American Anti-Slavery Society.

TRIUMPH OF THE SAINTS 289

The society Garrison set out to capture in May, 1840,
was already moribund. All hope of an effective program
died the previous December with the refusal of the Massa-
chusetts Society to provide any money whatever. The Ex-
ecutive Committee made one last desperate appeal at a special
meeting in January, but no funds were forthcoming from
delegates who knew all too well just how weak the society
had grown. Instead, a committee was appointed and given
the power to decide the future of the organization and plans
were made for the transference of the Emancipator to the
New York City Anti-Slavery Society. The committee issued
its report recommending that the national organization either
be allowed to operate where it pleased or be disbanded. On
the assumption that the old privilege would never be re-
stored, the Executive Committee looked forward to dissolving
the society in May, disposing of its stock of tracts and
pamphlets, and completing the sale of the Emancipator. In
the meantime they pondered Leavitt's suggestion that they
continue to operate ex officio as a clearinghouse.

When news of the Executive Committee's plans reached
Boston, Garrison issued his countermanifesto. "That society
must and will be sustained, under the guidance of a trust-
worthy committee, let who will plot to destroy it, whether
treacherous friend, or open foe."is He called for a strong
delegation of "unswerving, uncorruptible friends of the
cause" to go to New York and save it. The same power
which had sought the life of the Massachusetts Society, he
told them, now threatened the whole movement. "It has
thrown its mask aside, and unblushingly declares that our
sacred cause cannot be safely trusted in the hands of 'the
common people' — die farmers, mechanics, and workingmen
— but must be placed under the control of a select body of
men in order to give it respectability and success!" To ac-

290 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

compUsh their ends the traitors would come to the annual
meeting ready to demand the repeal of the rule allowing
women to vote. Then they would try to rush through the
convention a resolution making voting mandatory for mem-
bers of the society and outlawing the nonresistant aboli-
tionists. It would require great vigilance on the part of the
real friends of the slave to defeat this scheme. "In what-
ever part of the country you reside, we call you to rally at
the meeting as one man."14

Unwilling to leave it to chance or the uncertain consciences
of men to provide him with a majority, he decided to pack the
annual meeting, a fairly simple maneuver since there was no
rule limiting the number of delegates from any one state. This
meant, in effect, that the society would fall to anyone with
enough votes. His votes would have to come from Abby
Kelley's feminine anti-slavery contingent whose headquarters
was the Essex County Society in Lynn. The problem of trans-
porting the ladies along with an unusually large delegation of
men was solved by the general agent, John Collins, who
suggested chartering a special train to Providence and from
there a steamboat to New York. The fare was cheap, and
arrangements could be made for boarding the delegates in
the homes of colored friends in the city for twenty-five cents
a day. The results of Collins's work were described by Garri-
son himself. "A few came from the land of 'down east' and
the thick-ribbed hills of the Granite State; but especially
from the counties of old Essex and Middlesex, and Norfolk,
and Plymouth, and Suffolk, in Massachusetts, they came
promptly and numerously at the summons of HUMANITY, in
spite of 'hard times' and the busy season of the year, to save
our heaven-approved association from dissolution, and our
broad platform from being destroyed."15

From the railing of the steamship Rhode Island Garrison

TRIUMPH OF THE SAINTS

watched "a heart-stirring and rare spectacle" as hundreds of
his delegates marched up the gangplank while Collins checked
them off. "There never has been such a mass of 'ultraism*
afloat," he wrote, "since the first victim was stolen from the
fire-smitten and blood-red soil of Africa." A three-day
nor'easter cleared just as the Rhode Island put down Nar-
ragansett Bay, a sign, some thought, of God's pleasure with
His annotated. A glorious sunset and full moon put the
passengers in the proper spirit for a night of anti-slavery
lectures — seven in all — and when the ship docked in New
York it was dawn. Four hundred and fifty delegates from
New England descended on the city ready to rescue the
American Anti-Slavery Society from oblivion. Four hundred
of them came from seaboard counties in Massachusetts; one
hundred and fifty were women; twenty-seven only were
nonresistants. "They were, indeed, the moral and religious
elite of New England abolitionism, who have buckled on the
anti-slavery armor to wear to the end of the conflict, or to
the close of life."

The annual meeting was held in the Tappans' Fourth Free
Church on the corner of Madison and Catherine Streets.
Arthur Tappan, the president of the society, hearing of the
impending crisis, chose not to attend, a tactical error that
allowed Francis Jackson to preside. The Executive Committee
had known that the Garrisonians were beating the bushes for
delegates and had hurried to follow their example. Over a
thousand delegates crowded the first session and sat rest-
lessly through the interminable opening ceremonies which
could not hide the rising tension. Then came hours of debate
filled with pious hypocrisy and mutual recrimination; but
when a vote was finally taken on the admission of women,
Garrison's party won 557 to 45 1.16 He had used his "Lynn
majority" to good advantage. Lewis Tappan promptly re-

292 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

signed from the Business Committee and soon thereafter led
the exodus of anti-Garrisonians from the hall Over four
hundred left the meeting for a conference room in the
church basement, where they drew up plans for a new
society. Upstairs the Garrisonians rejoiced. "It was our anti-
slavery boatload that saved our society from falling into the
hands of the new organizers, or more correctly, disorgan-
izes/' Garrison boasted, not without truth.

While the secessionists launched their new American and
Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, the Garrisonians, or the "old
organization," as they now called themselves, made quick
work of refashioning their institution. First they elected
Lucretia Mott, Maria Weston Chapman, and Lydia Child
to the new Executive Committee and then passed resolutions
censuring the secessionists and denouncing both the Ameri-
can church and the third party movement. "We have made
clean work of everything/' Garrison chortled, " — adopted
the most thorough-going resolutions, and taken the strongest
ground, with crashing unanimity."17

The old organization — now "our society" — hardly seemed
worth the fight. The treasury was empty, its stock of litera-
ture gone, the allegiance of most of the state organizations
lost. From now on, the American Anti-Slavery Society func-
tioned chiefly as an auxiliary of the Massachusetts Society.
The secessionists had taken the Emancipator with them, and
there were almost no funds available for a new paper. Un-
perturbed, Garrison set up headquarters in Nassau Street
as a temporary clearinghouse for the little business which
now befell the organization. Mrs. Child agreed to try editing
the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the new paper, and
delegates were appointed to the World Anti-Slavery Con-
vention to be held in June in London. Garrison was well
pleased with his work. "Our campaign has just closed and a

TRIUMPH OF THE SAINTS 293

severe siege we have had of it, and a glorious triumph, we
have achieved." What the fruits of victory would be no one
knew.

Garrison always represented the schism of 1840 as the
victory of progressive reform over the reactionary forces of
sectarianism and political double-dealing. The real issues
were somewhat different. In the first place, the division was
not solely the result of woman's rights: The participation of
women was only the immediate cause. The Executive
Committee and its allies knew that Garrison planned to use
his women delegates to defeat political anti-slavery and intro-
duce the principles of no-government. Lewis Tappan had
seen the issue clearly from the beginning. The national
society broke apart, he told Weld, "chiefly because Garrison
and his party . . . foisted upon the Amer. And S. Soc. the
woman question, no government question, etc., and the bad
spirit shown by the Liberator, etc." Garrison had been the
aggressor from the beginning. "W.L.G. introduced the ques-
tion into the Anti S. Soc. to make an experiment upon the
public. He had avowed before that there were subjects
paramount to the Anti S. cause. And he was using the Society
as an instrument to establish these notions. Since he intro-
duced this question the slave has been lost sight of mainly."18
The capture of the national society marked the height of
Garrison's anti-slavery career and ironically the beginning of
its decline. Having rejected politics and turned his back on the
church, he could lead his "old society" in just one direction
— toward the principle of "No Union with Slaveholders" and
the doctrine of secession.

Leaving the affairs of the society in a muddle, he hurried
off to London in hope of arriving in time for the first session
of the World Convention. The World Anti-Slavery Conven-
tion had been called by the British abolitionists at the sug-

294 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

gestion of the New York Committee to discuss the progress
of West Indian emancipation and accelerate the work in
America. The first call was issued to all "friends of the
slave/' but when the English learned that the Massachusetts
abolitionists planned to demonstrate for the rights of women
by appointing female delegates, they sent a second invitation
reminding the Americans that "gentlemen only were ex-
pected to attend." These careful reminders went unheeded
in Massachusetts, where Maria Chapman and Harriet Mar-
tineau, an honorary member of the Massachusetts Society,
had already been appointed delegates.

After the secession, the "old organization" appointed Garri-
son, Charles Remond, William Adams and Nathaniel P.
Rogers as its accredited delegates. Remond, a free Negro of
intelligence and ability, was one of the most effective
lecturers in Garrison's collection. Just thirty years old and
wholly self-educated, he had joined the Garrisonians three
years before and served as agent of the Massachusetts Society.
He was a proud man with a quick temper and a savage wit,
and as a campaigner did more than anyone except Freder-
ick A. Douglass to acquaint audiences in the Northeast with
the intellectual potential of the Negro. William Adams was
a Quaker from Rhode Island, a loyal Garrisonian and a man
of unexceptionable parts. Nathaniel P. Rogers, the fourth
member of the delegation, had only recently taken up the
anti-slavery cause and was destined to become a particularly
painful thorn in Garrison's side. Rogers once boasted that
he could "out-Garrison Garrison," and so he could. Ten years
older than his chief, secretary of the New Hampshire Society
and nonresistant editor of the Herald of Freedom, he had
emerged suddenly in the stormy days of 1839 as a valuable
ally and was being groomed for the new post at the Anti-
Slavery Standard in case Mrs. Child refused. "The more I

TRIUMPH OF THE SAINTS 295

see of Rogers, I love him," Garrison wrote to Helen from
New York, "and his friendship for me is ardent and sin-
cere."19 It would remain so for three years.

The "new organization" also sent delegates to the World
Convention, among them Birney and Stanton, who were
resolved on preventing Garrison from bamboozling the
British abolitionists as he had the Americans. Joshua Leavitt
spoke for all of the secessionists when he expressed the hope
that the winds would prove "over-organized and delay their
champion." Leavitt's wish was granted — the Columbus with
its radical cargo took twenty-five days to reach Liverpool.
Garrison improved his time by remonstrating with the cap-
tain for putting Remond in steerage, and studying the con-
dition of the sailors in the merchant marine. When things
grew dull, he chided the passengers for their drinking habits
and loose morals. He was glad to part company with such
"immoral creatures" when on June 16 the Columbus docked
in Liverpool. By then the World Convention had been in
session for three days.

He arrived at Freemasons' Hall in Great Queen Street to
find the fight for admission of women already lost. In the
balcony sat Lucretia Mott, Ann Phillips, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and the rest of the women delegates surrounded by
attentive gentlemen from the floor but denied the right to
participate. Wendell Phillips, heeding his wife's instructions
not to "shilly-shally," had done his best to crack English
reserve. At the opening session he moved that all persons
accredited by any anti-slavery society be admitted to the
convention, but immediately the defenders of male order
protested, English clergyman vying with American to ex-
plain why the ladies, amiable as they were, had no right to
be there. Phillips's motion was struck down, his protest tabled,

296 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

and his female admirers escorted to the balcony, where Garri-
son found them.20

Apprised of the situation, Garrison agreed not to disturb
the convention "by renewing the agitation of the subject
already decided," but he was determined to add his protest
by joining the ladies. Lucretia Mott thought it a foolish
gesture and said so, though Rogers was sure their silent pro-
test shocked the English. "Haman never looked more blank
on seeing Mordecai sitting in the king's gate with his hat
on, than did this 'Committee in Conference' on seeing us
take the position we did."21 The Garrisonians stayed with
the women for the rest of the convention, deaf to the en-
treaties from the floor to come down. Daniel O'Connell
objected to the exclusion of women, as did John Stuart Mill's
friend John Bowring, but the majority of the delegates
were well satisfied with the location of the ladies and their
champion. Garrison had the bad grace to suggest to friends
that Phillips had mismanaged the affair, and wrote to his wife
that "had we arrived a few days before the opening of the
Convention, we could have carried our point triumphantly."22
His unfair remark told only of his dissatisfaction with the
results of the convention.

He was dissatisfied with his whole visit, which contrasted
sharply with his reception seven years earlier. Thanks to
Birney and Stanton the English abolitionists knew all about his
"steal." There were the usual elaborate dinner parties at
Samuel Gurney's and William Ball's and luncheons with
Powell Buxton and Lord Morpeth. The Duchess of Suther-
land and Lady Byron lavished attention on Remond and
Rogers, while Mrs. Opie and Elizabeth Fry saw to it that
Garrison did not lack for edifying entertainment. But he was
not asked to speak at the anniversary meeting of the British
and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, though Birney and Stan-

TRIUMPH OF THE SAINTS 297

ton were. He did manage an impromptu talk at a soiree fol-
lowing the meeting, where he aired his "singular views," as
Birney called them. "He has gained, I think, but few ad-
herents to them," Birney observed with some satisfaction.23
One evening he surprised his hosts by contending for a uni-
versal reform of language; at another dinner party he as-
tonished the well-fed guests with a lengthy discourse on
perfectionism. "I let out all my heresies, in my intercourse
with those who invite us, and have made no little stir in con-
sequence," he reported proudly to his wife.24 Birney thought
his performances laughable, and Elizabeth Stanton, Henry's
outspoken bride, remarked that every time he opened his
mouth out came folly. At still another soiree he proceeded to
bear "faithful testimony" against Drs. James Hoby and Fran-
cis A. Cox, revered figures in the English religious community,
because they had not condemned all aspects of Southern life.
Perhaps it was the general expression of disappointment among
his hosts or simply his own at being elbowed aside for the
representatives of the "new organization." At any rate, he
was content to be hurried off to Scotland by Thompson for
a series of meetings at Edinburgh and Glasgow. "Though I
like England much, on many accounts," he told Helen, "I
can truly say that I like Scotland better."25

In Glasgow he encountered opposition of a new kind. Out-
side the Emancipation Chapel where he was to speak he
found Chartist pickets distributing handbills captioned Have
We No White Slaves? and exposing the working conditions
in the mills and mines. He took one and read it to the as-
sembly inside. Were there white slaves as well as black?
"NO," he replied. " — broad as is the empire, and extensive
as are the possessions of Great Britain, not a single white
slave can be found in them all." There was a difference be-
tween chattel slaves and "those who are only suffering from

298 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

certain forms of political injustice or governmental oppres-
sion." Admittedly, there were poor people dying of starva-
tion and little children working long hours in mills, and there
were also hundreds of thousands of laborers deprived of their
political rights. But British abolitionists were not blind to
"suffering humanity" at home; they were friends of the
poor and lowly. "Are they not so?" he asked. "No! No!"
called out several voices. "Then," he stammered, "I ain
very sorry to hear it." After he sat down a Chartist attempted
to answer him only to be shouted down. "I, for one, should
have had no objections to his being heard," Garrison later
explained, "yet he was clearly out of order, and had no just
cause to complain of the meeting."26 This kind of agitator
with his "rude behavior" and "criminal conduct" upset
him. Where were the appeals to reason, justice and the law
of God — where the unwavering reliance upon Christian
truth? It was clear that England and Scotland were no
longer as he had remembered them.

In London, Garrison talked with Robert Owen but found
the old man's ideas "absurd and demoralizing," wild dreams
that would "make shipwreck of any scheme under its guid-
ance, in due season."27 Perhaps a man's environment did af-
fect his development, and there was no doubt that a drastic
reorganization of society was needed, but an inner rather
than an outward reordering, a change of heart, not socialism.

Garrison's conservatism had deep roots. As a moralist first
and last he believed that any permanent change in the social
structure would have to be preceded by a general renovation
of the human heart. Thus his views tended to uphold the
political status quo and to defend laissez-faire capitalism by
redirecting the current of reform into channels remote from
the economic and social evils of his day. In the first issue
of the Liberator he had denounced attempts "to inflame the

TRIUMPH OF THE SAINTS 299

minds of our working classes against the more opulent. . . .
That public grievances exist, is undoubtedly true, but they
are not confined to any one class of society." Ten years had
not altered this view. He noted the glaring contrasts in Eng-
lish society, the "suffering and want staring me in the face
on the one hand" and the "opulence and splendor dazzling
my vision on the other,"28 yet no solution occurred to him
except that of "going about doing good." Here was the
paradox of his moral suasion: just as the doctrine of immediate
emancipation logically implied a social revolution of epic
proportions, so his condemnation of the evils of an irresponsi-
ble industrial system called for a profound economic change.
In neither instance was he willing to face the consequences
of his moral vision.

In August he was back in Boston for a reception at Marl-
boro' Chapel where he struck a new patriotic note which
must have startled his audience. "I thank God that I was
born in the United States," he told them, "that my field of
labor lies in the United States." He saw now that the English
abolitionists — those once worthy members of the British
and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society — had been remiss in their
duty toward their own people. British anti-slavery had never
been tried in the fiery furnace; it shunned the company of the
real American abolitionists "with pro-slavery and delicacy
of feeling." At last the truth! He had been rejected and his
followers ignored. The Atlantic community of feeling had
dissolved, and henceforth Americans could look only to their
own resources.

These resources seemed meager indeed in the autumn of
1840. Shorn of most of its auxiliaries, the old organization
was on the verge of collapse. Each number of the Anti-
Slavery Standard promised to be the last; rent was owing on
the Nassau Street headquarters. Ignoring the advice of Quincy

300 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

and Phillips, who foresaw bankruptcy, he decided to send
an agent to England to solicit funds among the few English
abolitionists still loyal to him. The mission was a "dernier
ressort," undertaken with great reluctance, but the critical
condition of the society made an appeal for funds imperative.
Without aid from abroad, he admitted, "I am apprehensive
that the American Anti-Slavery Society, with the National
Standard, Rogers and all, must sink."29 He did not exag-
gerate — the situation was desperate.

The financial troubles of the old organization were com-
pounded by numerous defections from nonresistance as the
Presidential election approached. Collins, who was struggling
to hold the loyalty of anti-slavery men in western Massachu-
setts, advised Garrison again and again to adapt his pro-
gram to withstand a "whirlwind of Political enthusiasm. . . .
I really wish you understood perfectly the exact position
the friends of the old organization hold to the two great
political parties. . . . They are politically intoxicated. The
enthusiasm of Bank and Sub-Treasury, Harrison and Reform,
has taken entire possession of them."30 Typical of this new
attitude was the case of George Bradburn, a minister from
Attleboro, a loyal Garrisonian and friend of the Liberator.
Bradburn had suddenly made up his mind to vote Whig be-
cause the party, at least in Massachusetts, was more friendly
to the abolitionists than the Democratic Party* Garrison dis-
missed such explanations as conniving at robbery. "Let no
whig or democrat abolitionist," he implored, "sacrifice his
anti-slavery principles, or go with his party, at the coming
election, on the grounds that he thinks or knows that some-
one else will prove recreant."31 Yet this was precisely what
was happening everywhere. "The fact is," he admitted rue-
fully, "and we cannot and ought not to hide it, a large pro-
portion of the abolitionists in this State and elsewhere, are

TRIUMPH OF THE SAINTS 301

determined to go with their party at the approaching elec-
tion; and they will not attend our meetings until after the
election, even if at all. This is not less humiliating than true."32

To recall Massachusetts abolitionists to their duty he held
two conventions in October. The first at Worcester proved
"very interesting, but the number of delegates not large,"
and the second at Springfield came "very near being a total
failure." Each week the Liberator censured the "arbitrary
and prescriptive" spirit of political parties, and its editor re-
minded readers that the organization of a party "was never
dreamed of by abolitionists in the days of their purity and
simple reliance on truth." He even went so far as to identify
the third party with the new organization "full of self-seeking,
and swayed by sectarian motives." It was with obvious relief
that he announced the end of the Presidential campaign. It had
been all of the devil, nothing of God. The American people
were obviously losing their self-respect. Log cabins, hard
cider, parades and triumphal arches — what were these but
conclusive proof of the "besotted state" of the public mind?33
With regret he turned from the unenlightening spectacle of
democratic poEtics to the question of universal reform and
attended the Chardon Street Convention, that singular con-
ference of reformers and cranks which met for three days in
November without reaching any conclusions or passing a
single resolution.

Emerson has left the best account of the Chardon Street
Convention. "Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunk-
ers, Muggletonians, Gome-outers, Groaners, Agrarians,
Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Uni-
tarians and Philosophers — all came successively to the top,
and seized their moment, if not their hour, wherein to chide,
or pray, or preach, or protest."34 The truculent prophet
Joseph Palmer was there striding through the assembly with

302 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

his holy beard and defying any man to cut it off. So was
"that flea of conventions" Abby Folsom, primed with her
interminable harangue in defense of freedom of speech. Also
Dr. George W. F. Mellen, another cracked vessel of the Lord
who frequently interrupted the proceedings. But there were
also Theodore Parker and George Ripley, Bronson Alcott,
Emerson himself, William Ellery Channing and his nephew
William Henry Channing, the ubiquitous Henry Wright,
Abby Kelley, the recluse poet Jones Very, Father Taylor, the
sailor-preacher, and Maria Chapman — all met for a sharing of
views, bound together by their search for something "better
and more satisfying than a vote or a definition."

The convention had been called by the Friends of Uni-
versal Reform for the purpose of examining "the validity of
the views which generally prevail in this country as to the
divine appointment of the first day of the week as the
Christian Sabbath, and to inquire into the origin, nature,
and authority of the Ministry and the Church, as now
existing."35 Garrison had not signed the original call — he
believed the convention "premature" — but that fact did
not prevent the press generally from ascribing to him the
whole notion of an "infidel convention." Once he learned of
the "mighty stir" the meeting would make in Boston, how-
ever, he joined in doing "with our might what our hands find
to do."36

The Chardon Street Convention was one of the few meet-
ings in a lifetime of conferences and convocations in which
Garrison found himself on the Right with the conservatives.
It opened with a lively skirmish over the question introduced
by the Gome-Outers of abolishing parliamentary procedure
altogether and proceeding without chairman and without
restraint. Though the motion was defeated, parliamentary
order was not forthcoming. Joshua Himes demanded that

TRIUMPH OF THE SAINTS 303

the convention accept only the Old and New Testaments as
proof for all arguments. When a storm of protest descended
on Himes and his fellow ministers, Garrison came to their
aid by requesting that all those who rejected divine authority
be barred from participating. "I expressly declared that I
stood upon the Bible, and the Bible alone, in regard to my
views . . . and that I felt that if I could not stand trium-
phantly on that foundation, I could stand nowhere in the
universe."37 The convention would be bound by no such
niggling rule as this. When John Pierpont introduced the
proposition "That the first day of the week is ordained by
divine authority as the Christian Sabbath," Scriptural proof
was tossed to the winds. Accompanied by cries of "Infidel!"
and "Atheist!" or "Priest!" and "Bigot!" the speakers, often
two or three at once, clamored to be heard. Periodically Abby
Folsorn or the unfortunate Dr. Mellen conducted a foray on
the rostrum only to be turned back by saner minds intent on
hearing the ponderous arguments of Amos Phelps and Dr.
Samuel Osgood. Father Taylor spoke fervently and fre-
quently. Emerson, who confessed to watching the clock at
philanthropic conventions, said nothing, preferring to leave
it to the genius of Bronson Alcott to summarize the sense
of the meeting in orphic sayings.

It was all delightfully zany — no minutes, no resolutions,
no reports, no results — simply "the elucidation of truth
through free discussion."38 The truth which these men were
seeking lay outside the Jacksonian compass, beyond all proj-
ects, plans, blueprints, all "small, sour, and fierce schemes."
The Chardon Street Convention was a strange collection of
reformers in whom the social sentiment was weak and the
dictates of what Emerson called "the great inward Com-
mander" were particularly strong. The very principle the
members admitted seeking they had already found, for they

304 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

came to the Chardon Street Chapel believing that the indi-
vidual was the world. They were philosophical anarchists
who were perfectly willing to be dismissed as "the sentimental
class" by the so-called realists of American politics because
it was just the "reality" of Manifest Destiny and the margin
of profit they questioned.

Although he was fairly overwhelmed by his colleagues,
Garrison sensed that they were the prophets of a new age,
critical of their society but strong in their belief that they
could redeem it. Some of them saw the cure in the regenera-
tion of the individual; others dreamed of a new life in a
Fourierist phalanstery or a New Harmony. All were agreed
that there was much that was wrong with America. Garrison
still believed that slavery was the evil and Christ the cure;
but whether the millennium would be built by men or come
by divine dispensation he no longer knew.

14
"No Union with Slaveholders"

ON AN AUGUST DAY in 1841 two carriages rolled slowly
through Franconia Notch in the White Mountains.
In the first chaise rode two New Hampshire abolitionists,
Thomas Beach and Ezekiel Rogers, deep in conversation,
and behind them came Garrison and Nathaniel Rogers, his
new friend and headstrong colleague, singing hymns at the
top of their voices. All four were on their way to an anti-
slavery meeting. Suddenly Garrison noticed a cloud of smoke
coming from the carriage ahead — it seemed to be rising from
beneath friend Ezekiel's beaver hat. He stared. Could It be
tobacco smoke? Had Ezekiel become a chimney flue? He
called to him and remarked the incongruity of an abolitionist's
profaning his mouth with the stupefying weed. Might as
well make it a rum-duct! "We had halted at the Iron Works
tavern to refresh our horses," Nathaniel remembered, "and
while they were eating, walked to view the Furnace. As we
crossed the little bridge, friend Rogers took out another
cigar, as if to light it when we should reach the fire. Is it
any malady you have got, brother Rogers,' said we to him,
'that you smoke that thing, or is it habit and indulgence
merely?' 'It is nothing but habit/ said he gravely; 'or, I would
say it 'was nothing eke,' and he significantly cast the little
roll over the railing into the Ammonoosuck. 'A revolution!'

306 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

exclaimed Garrison, 'a glorious revolution without noise or
smoke/ and he swung his hat cheerily about his head."1

The schism of 1840, another revolution without casualties,
opened a decade of confused politics both within the anti-
slavery movement and in the country at large. The annexation
of Texas planted the slavery issue in Congress, where it
grew like a virus for fifteen years, draining off the energies
of legislators and paralyzing the business of government. With
the enormous new area seized from Mexico, the United States
acquired the problem — abstract and hypothetical as it may
have seemed at first — of the status of slavery there. The
dragons' teeth of a future civil war were strewn over the
rocky plateaus of Mexico by Winfield Scott and Zachary
Taylor, each too busy countering the political ambitions of
the other to foresee the results of their conquest.

The decade opened at home with the death of the new
President and the strange sight of a Virginian of only nominal
Whig loyalties in the White House. Four years later the
Whigs again looked on in dismay as Birney's Liberty Party
stole enough of Clay's New York votes to throw the state
and the election to Polk. Then it was the turn of the Demo-
crats when David Wilmot drove a sectional wedge into the
party by attempting to ban slavery from the new territory.
In 1848 political disorder reached its climax, and the country
witnessed the spectacle of Conscience against Cotton, Hunker
against Barnburner, Free Soil against Manifest Destiny. It
was a period of broken alliances as parties scrambled to
adjust to the reality of the slavery question and new men be-
gan following new sectional directives. No matter where they
began — in Charleston or Boston, in cotton plantation or
cotton mill — these sectional lines of force led straight to
Washington, the new center of agitation over slavery.

It was also a period of reorganization and retrenchment

"NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS" 307

for abolitionists, who belatedly recognized the institutional
breakdown which the schism had caused. Once a year, until
they tired of the farce, Garrison and his followers made the
trek to New York for the annual meeting of the American
Anti-Slavery Society, listened to three days of speeches,
each more radical than the last, and returned to Boston. Nor
was the secessionist American and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society — the "soulless new organization," as the Garrison-
ians continued to call it — any more representative of aboli-
tionist sentiment in the North. Weld disowned it, and despite
the exertions of Lewis Tappan, many of its supporters soon
drifted into the Liberty Party camp. Yet the Liberty Party
vote in 1 844 totaled only sixty-two thousand, a gain of eight
hundred per cent over four years but hardly an index of
Northern views on the expansion of slavery. Three conclu-
sions appeared inescapable: the national organization was
dead, the careers of many of the pioneers were at an end,
and the anti-slavery impulse had broadened. In 1846, at the
outbreak of the war with Mexico, abolitionists were amazed
to discover that the North, and particularly New England,
had developed an anti-slavery conscience. No one could
quite explain the phenomenon.

Confusion reigned in the Garrison household, as though
completing its mastery over moral reform by disrupting the
affairs of its leader. Babies arrived regularly — Charles Follen
Garrison in 1842; Fanny, her father's favorite, named for
his mother, in 1844; Elizabeth Pease two years later; and
Francis Jackson in 1 848 — five boys and two girls. The baby
Elizabeth lived only two years, and Charles died at the age
of seven, scalded by a steam bath, a victim of his father's
faith in medical quackery. His children found him a happy
and surprisingly indulgent parent, given to pranks, boisterous
games, and family outings. He worried a good deal about his

jo8 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON-

health and suffered from all manner of ailments, real or
imaginary, aching joints, gastric complications, heart palpita-
tions, recurrent headaches. Not a year passed that he did not
add to this list of infirmities, as though his body protested
his puritanical principles. He bore cheerfully his friends'
jokes at his hypochondria while waiting patiently for another
doctor to consult and another diagnosis to consider. Once
Phillips and Quincy prevailed upon him to see Dr. John War-
ren about a swelling in his chest (he called it his "devil"), but
Warren found nothing wrong with him. Mostly he preferred
the various services of itinerant quacks, country bone-setters,
faith-healers and animal magnetists, homeopaths and hydro-
paths. Nothing pleased him more than a disagreement in
diagnosis. "Who shall decide," he chuckled, "when doctors
disagree?" When Warren and then Bowditch pronounced
him sound, he started the rounds of "clairvoyants," as Quincy
irreverently called them, "who examined his internals with
the back of their heads." "The ocular, or occipital, evidence
of these last worthies," Quincy added dryly, "is the most
satisfactory to his mind. To most men, the circumstance
that they gave diametrically opposite accounts of the case
would be startling, but then G. believes them both equally,
which arranges the affair satisfactorily."2 The family medicine
shelf held everything from Buchan's Hungarian Balsam of
Life to Dr. Church's Pectoral Pills. Once Garrison took a
dose of the same Dr. Church's Anti-Scrofulous Panacea and
exclaimed that he felt it permeating the whole system. "Per-
meating the system!" Dr. Weston snorted. "Why, it was
the first time he had taken a glass of grog, and he didn't know
how good it was."

For years die family drifted from one home to another.
Wherever they were, their home was an anti-slavery hotel
with a housekeeper, an occasional neighbor, and two or

"NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS" 309

three visiting friends of universal reform who had heard of
Garrison's love of conversation and his wife's table* The
Boston clique saw to it that he did not lack for necessities*
"I see you have a houseful of people," Charles Hovey wrote
to Helen in sending her a barrel of flour. "Your husband's
position brings him many guests and expenses which do not
belong to him/' God continued to provide but in small
amounts. "I am never so far in funds as to have a spare dollar
by me, using what economy I can," Garrison complained. His
financial dependence on well-to-do friends, however, entailed
no loss of self-esteem.

In 1842 James Garrison died. Lloyd improved the occasion
of the funeral by delivering a lecture on the evils of war and
alcohol. Though he spoke of his brother's fortitude and
resignation, he scarcely understood the tragedy of James's
struggle. James had escaped his mother's domination by run-
ning away and turning to drink; Lloyd, while he never had to
escape, had transferred his resistance to maternal authority
into a hatred of society and a compulsion to tear it down.
Before he died James might have seen that his brother's
search for sainthood and obsession with purity, his anxiety
and hostility, were somehow related to the image of the
mother they both professed to have cherished. But Lloyd
was bent on saving him and had convinced him of his "evil
qualities." His death brought Garrison no closer to a self-
confrontation than questioning whether James died "recon-
ciled to God."

Garrison was away from home more than ever now that
he had joined the anti-slavery lecturers in the field One re-
sult of the schism of 1840 and the rise of the Liberty Party
was the need for fence-mending in New England and western
New York. Leaving his paper in the hands of Johnson and
Quincy, he took to the circuit with PhilKps, Remond and

3io

THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Frederick Douglass, younger and hardier lecturers whose
hectic pace wore him down. Douglass he discovered at a
New Bedford meeting and developed him into one of his
most successful lecturers until the young man proved too
headstrong to be harnessed. Douglass's strength on the plat-
form lay in his dignity and lofty tone. Remond was witty
and quick with repartee, high-spirited and fractious. Phillips
possessed the power of improvisation, a theatrical suppleness
and urbanity that made him the greatest of the anti-slavery
orators. Garrison lacked all of these qualities. His forte was
earnestness, and his best audiences were usually Quakers.
"Garrison just suited them," Sydney Gay remarked to Ed-
mund Quincy of one of Garrison's appearances in Phila-
delphia. "His soberness, his solemnity, his earnestness — his
evident deep religious feeling — his simplicity — all these were
just what the Quakers love, & they gathered about him as
their fathers did about Fox, & said yea! verily! he is a
prophet! "3

He was known now as one of the "old men" in the move-
ment, though only in his late thirties, and was in constant
demand as a speaker. He spent most of the year 1841 travel-
ing in New England and attending local conventions in the
attempt to strike the spark of organization again. In the fall
of 1842, together with Douglass, Abby Kelley and Charles
Remond, he toured western New York with the hope of
bringing some of the wayward politicians back into the fold.
Though the invasion failed and there were almost no con-
verts, his "menagerie" performed well under adverse condi-
tions. His greatest difficulty was persuading Douglass and
Remond, neither of them particularly concerned with the
rigors of a schedule, to keep their appointments. At Syracuse,
Garrison reported, "the tumult was tremendous" following an
ill-chosen comparison of the Methodist Episcopal Church to

UNO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS 311

a New York brothel. "Rotten eggs were now thrown, one
of which was sent as a special present to me, and struck the
wall over my head, scattering its contents on me and others."4
Benches were hurled and windows smashed to the tune of
hisses and curses before the meeting was hastily adjourned.
He told his wife he still believed that "genuine anti-slavery"
would gain a foothold there, but his opinion was not shared
by his colleagues who realized that, adapted to the rocky soil
of New England, Garrisonism was not destined to flourish on
the banks of the Genesee.

While its editor canvassed the countryside the Liberator
languished. Lydia and David Child's National Anti-Slavery
Standard, though Garrison disapproved its Whig bias, was
ably conducted and for the moment self-sustaining, while his
own paper stood in need of editorial as well as financial re-
pair. The truth was that it was badly edited and frequently
uninteresting. In the first place, the layout was eccentric.
Articles were thrown in "higgledy-piggledy," readers corn-
plained. No single issue was complete, matters were too often
left at loose ends with the promise of "more anon" or "more
next week" when "next week" never came. Then there were
not enough carefully written editorials, too many off-the-
cuff commentaries and too few well-chosen articles. In an
election week why was there no comment on the political
situation? Why the time-lag between news stories on page
one and editorials on page three? Quincy remonstrated with
him and warned that unless he corrected his careless habits
the Liberator would have to be discontinued. "Now we know
that you have talent enough and to spare to write editorials,
such as no other editor can; that you have the most ample
materials for the best of selections, and eminent tact and
sagacity for judging what is timely; and, moreover, that you
have abundance of time for doing all this, if you would but

3i2 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

have a little method in your madness." All that was lacking,
Quincy explained, was industry and application.5 Quincy
asked the impossible: as the years went by, the Liberator
grew more and more personal, disorganized, and erratic as
its editor lost the fiery zeal of his youth.

The disruptive forces within the anti-slavery movement
after 1840 were several, but most important, perhaps, was a
sudden awareness among abolitionists of the complexity of
social evils and their growing reluctance to isolate slavery as
the universal wrong. They saw that poverty and suffering
were not heaven-directed but man-made, and they began to
consider solutions that fell short of a regeneration of the hu-
man race. In short, they discovered social planning. A dra-
matic example of the discovery of Utopian planning was the
career of John A. Collins, General Agent of the Massachu-
setts Society and Garrisonian knight-errant. Collins joined
the anti-slavery movement as a young theological student at
Andover, where he proved his usefulness by uncovering the
"clerical plot" against Garrison. His rise thereafter was me-
teoric, and in 1840 he was selected to undertake the delicate
mission to England for funds to bail out the American Anti-
Slavery Society. His expedition, perhaps the most inglorious
of all abolitionist appeals to British philanthropy, ended in
failure, and he had to borrow the passage money back to
Boston. But his visit was the beginning of his education in the
problems of industrial civilization. The horrors of Liverpool
slums and brutal working conditions in the Midlands con-
vinced him that the English suffered from "the same prejudice
against poverty, that we do against color."6 The English
themselves were guilty of "a vast and complicated system"
of slavery, a form as dangerous as it was subtle, which gave
to the poor subject the appearance of freedom the more
successfully to grind him to powder. Laissezfaire, he con-

NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS 313

eluded, had created a nation of drones virtually slaves though
technically free. Neither Corn Law nor Chartism held the
answer to the dislocations caused by industrialism; nothing
would suffice "until the entire social structure, from which
the state is but an emanation, is completely changed."

Collins left England a convert of Robert Owen, and al-
though he took up his abolitionist duty on his return, his
heart was no longer in it. It seemed to him now that slavery
was only a small part of the vast question of social reorgan-
ization. In 1843 he formed the Society of Universal Inquiry
and Reform on the premise that competition was a failure
and that the future of America lay in self-sustaining com-
munities of three hundred families happily free from the
curse of acquisitiveness. Soon thereafter his society bought
three hundred acres outside Skaneateles, New York, and
began working the land on the principle of "Unity in Love,"
Garrison, though interested in the scheme, was sure that
Collins's underlying moral philosophy had been disproved by
"myriads of facts, drawn from a world lying in iniquity,"
and predicted that the experiment would prove "the baseless
fabric of a benevolent dream."7 He admitted that Collins was
both earnest and dedicated, but rejected his ideas as "deceit-
ful"

Another experiment, more interesting and closer to home,
was Hopedale, founded at Milford, Massachusetts, by a fel-
low abolitionist and nonresistant Adin Ballou. Ballou was
descended from a long line of nonconformists, and he had
already been ousted from his Universalist pulpit for heresy
when he transformed the Jones Farm in Milford into Fra-
ternal Order Number One. At Hopedale each member agreed
to work eight hours a day for fifty cents and to give the
community one dollar a week for room and board. This
arrangement, Ballou explained, was "to facilitate the honest

314 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

acquisition of individual property for laudable purposes."
Thus, though it aimed at restoring pure Christianity, Hope-
dale was not communist. Like Garrison, Ballou was inter-
ested in every reform of his age — peace, woman's rights,
temperance, and anti-slavery. He built a Thornpsonian water
spa on the premises where ailing members could try cures of
hot herbs and vapor baths. The community presented lectures
on phrenology and mesmerism and seances with spiritualists.
Liquor and tobacco were forbidden at Hopedale, tea and
coffee discouraged, and the dietary schemes of Sylvester
Graham and Catherine Beecher much applauded. Ballou's
newspaper, the Practical Christian (a title borrowed from
Garrison), kept the gentile world abreast of activities in the
community. Its motto — "Absolute Truth, Essential Right-
eousness, Individual Responsibility, Social Reorganization,
Human Progress, Ultimate Perfection" — offered something
for everybody.8 Members of Hopedale may have been reach-
ing for the millennium, but they were also, in Ballou's estima-
tion, "plain practical people . . . very much like the middle
class of New Englanders generally," conscientious, earnest,
imperfect. Not so imperfect, however, as to be incapable of
substituting "Religious Consecration" for "Fragmentary,
Spasmodic Piety."

It was just Ballou's promise of practical righteousness which
Garrison doubted the power of any cooperative scheme to
achieve. That there were evils in society "too dreadful to be
contemplated by any human heart" he would not deny; but
that they sprang from external causes rather than "the evil
propensities of mankind" he could not agree. Ultimately the
regeneration of society reduced itself to a question of the indi-
vidual and his God. "Outward circumstances do indeed fre-
quently and extensively exert a disastrous influence on the
feelings and actions of the people; but the creator or cause

NO UNION "WITH SLAVEHOLDERS 315

of these circumstances have not been either Nature or a bene-
ficial Creator, but 'an evil heart of unbelief in man — an un-
willingness to perform right actions --an almost universal
disposition to reject 'the golden rule' as an unsafe rule of
action — a disregard of the laws of being — a contempt for the
commands, and a distrust in the promises of God."9 Bad laws,
hunger, poverty, and destitution, he knew, were the evil
fruits of the corrupt tree of man.

Then his brother-in-law George Benson decided to lay his
axe to the roots of the tree. In 1841 he sold the family farm
in Brooklyn and began a study of "the great subject of social
organization." "Where do you settle?" Garrison joked.
"What say you to a little community among ourselves?"10
Benson replied by founding within the year the Northampton
Association of Education and Industry. The Association was
divided into two separate enterprises — an industrial com-
munity of one hundred and twenty-five members and a stock
company of investors. Members of the community received
eighty cents a week for board, fuel, light and rent, and twenty
dollars a year for clothing. If their expenses exceeded this
amount, they were deducted from their share in the profits
from the brick factory and shingle mill. Benson's community
lasted four years, slightly longer than the Skaneateles experi-
ment.

Garrison spoke with pride of his brother-in-law and his
friends as "among the freest and best spirits of the age," and
he was a frequent visitor at the community. Yet he clung
to the belief that permanent changes in society originate
"within the individual and work outwards." It was Christ's
example that made better citizens. The trouble with com-
munity schemes — Bronson Alcott's as well as Robert Owen's
— was that they ignored this simple truth. "The chief ob-
stacles to the success of these communities or associations will

316 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

lie in the breasts of their members, and not in the present
state of society/'11 His old Federalist conservatism led him to
reject as "radically defective" any plan involving new prop-
erty relationships. Inequality of wealth he dismissed as simply
an "outward symptom" of an "inward disease," and he in-
sisted only religion could bring down the lofty and exalt the
depressed. "Every axiom of political economy that is not
based upon a law of God is, at best, but a cunning falsehood
or a plausible artifice. To attempt, therefore, to secure prop-
erty to a nation in any other manner than by seeking the
intellectual and moral improvement of the people — in one
word, by christianizing them, is something worse than a
blunder. It is to suspend the laws of the material world, and
expect that grapes may be gathered from thorns, and figs
from thistles. It is to unhinge the moral government of the
universe, and suppose that a great improvement can be made
upon the original plan."12 Peace to the ghost of Federalism
and a sigh for the days when saving religion and sound poli-
tics linked arms!

Garrison had even less sympathy with the religious mania
sweeping New England after 1 840 — the millenarian fantasy
of Father Miller. Miller's pre-millennial advent, first scheduled
for 1843 and then for October 22, 1844, won a number of
converts in Boston, notably Joshua Himes, pastor of the
Chardon Street Chapel, and Charles Fitch, once a member of
the "clerical conspiracy." In Himes, Miller found a revival
promoter without peer who helped spread his doctrines
throughout New England and western New York. Miller's
notions, like the Christian communism of the Utopians, were
implicit in perfectionism; but instead of making their heaven
on earth the Millerites were content to accept it from the
hand of God. Agreeing that Miller and Himes were "good
men" favorably inclined toward reform. Garrison neverthe-

NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS 317

less dismissed their ideas as absurd. "As the French Revolu-
tion was the legitimate product of the false religion of France,
to whom all its excesses and horrors are to be attributed, so
is the present 'Miller mania' to be traced to the false teach-
ings of a dumb and blind priesthood, and an apostate church,
for centuries."13 The fallacy in Miller's reasoning, Garrison
held, was not his doctrine of a second coming but his un-
warranted assumption that it lay in the future. As a disciple
of John Humphrey Noyes, Garrison believed that Christ had
returned eighteen hundred years ago. Jesus had told Paul
that "this generation shall not pass until these things are ful-
filled," and had returned about the year 60 A.D. after the
apostles had prepared for His coming. His return spelled the
end of the apostolic ministry with its church, and His new
dispensation set men wholly free to follow Him. This was
the "correct" view of the advent against which Miller set his
"novel and preposterous" explanation.14 Man's salvation thus
lay in a return to the simple Christianity of the disciples. Here
in the dim recesses of the first century the mistake had been
made, the sin of disobedience committed. To make a better
world, to free the slave, abolish inequality, banish suffering,
people would have to recognize their errors and return to the
point where they went wrong. Innocence had somehow been
lost, but not forever — by destroying wicked institutions and
corrupt laws men could recapture it. Their future lay buried
deep in their past, their salvation in an eternal return. The
way to Garrison's Utopia led through the doors of time and
memory and down the path of the original garden.

His views on the Bible were changing more rapidly than
he admitted. His critics still called him an "unbeliever" and "a
total stranger to the spirit of Christ," but he insisted that the
Scriptures were his "text-book" and worth all the other books
in the world. The text required no analysis, however, for he

318 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

was convinced that Christianity was neither argumentative
nor metaphysical but dealt with self-evident truths and spoke
an authoritative language. Theologians and preachers were
too concerned with metaphysics and legal niceties, and neg-
lected the plain, simple, soul-stirring message of the gospel.
Besides, the art of Scriptural quotation was known to the
devil. A hireling clergy quoted Paul who advised servants
to obey their masters, ordered women to keep silence in the
churches, and recommended a little wine for thy stomach's
sake. Garrison made a note to avoid Scriptural arguments
from now on, to teach "vital godliness" in place of "sectarian
theology." He would show an unbelieving world that the
true church was simply the fellowship of believers and that
ecclesiastical bodies were only cages of unclean birds and
stables of pollution. "Has God made it obligatory upon us,
(and we believe he has,) to have no fellowship with iniquity,
and yet at the same time does he require us to sustain that
which is in fellowship with all iniquity?"15 Clearly not! The
true Christian had no choice but to denounce evildoers and to
come out from among them.

Like all of the religious persuasions of the day, Garrison's
definition went by a name. "Come-Outerism," so called be-
cause its believers preached "coming out" of corrupt churches,
was as old as Christianity. The idea of secession in the name
of a rigorous piety had governed the Donatists in the fourth
century, the Albigensians in the eleventh, the Anabaptists in
the sixteenth, and the New-Lights in the eighteenth. Logi-
cally, the command to come out from iniquity was a part of
perfectionism — it completed it. A man who has achieved
perfection in this world risks losing it if he continues to hold
communion with the unsanctified. He must leave the un-
enlightened and their church or give up his status as a saint.
There were two main types of Gome-Outers in America be-

NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS 319

fore the Civil War: those who simply tested the churches by
anti-slavery standards and, finding them wanting, departed;
and the "genuine infidels," as Garrison called them, who re-
jected the whole institution of church and clergy. The differ-
ence between the two types was only one of degree, since
most of the more radical Gome-Outers were violently anti-
slavery. New England Come-Outerism seems to have origi-
nated among pietists on Cape Cod, but with the Second Great
Awakening it spread rapidly. The Gome-Outers were Chris-
tian anarchists who were often unable to agree on anything
besides their duty to leave a particular church. Perfectionists
on the march, they strode out of their churches on to the
farthest reaches of Christian piety and, in the case of Garri-
son's friends, to the brink of insanity.

Garrison saw the Gome-Outers as the harbingers of a sec-
ond Reformation, prophets destined to do for Protestantism
what Luther did to the Catholic Church. He particularly ad-
mired them for their self-reliance. They recognized no man
as apostle, prophet, presbyter, elder or deacon; they observed
no church form and were amenable to no tribunal; they were
bound by no creed, and they recorded their testimony against
all existing religions as destitute of the primitive gifts and
guilty of imposture. Surely the future of Christianity lay with
such free spirits as these who sought to atone for sinful men
by defying them. In the years after 1840 Come-Outerism
infiltrated his anti-slavery movement and transformed it into
a secessionist crusade.

The chief prophet of Come-Outerism was Garrison's new
friend Nathaniel Rogers. "We have a very humble but very
faithful little squad of abolitionists in this place & in our state,"
Rogers wrote to a friend in 1842. "They are at this moment
a little more radical, than the leading influences that surround
Garrison."16 As editor of the militant Herald of Freedom and

320 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

the leader of ultraism in New Hampshire, Rogers was in a
position to know. A graduate of Dartmouth and a successful
lawyer, he had abandoned a lucrative practice to organize
anti-slavery in the state. After witnessing the affair of the
"clerical appeal" he became convinced of the guilt of the
clergy and accepted perfectionism without reservation. His
obsession with consistency disturbed the Boston clique, whose
urbanity and sophistication he distrusted. "I wish we could
let politics entirely alone," he told those friends who thought
his views too severe. "Parties cant seem to handle principles.
They dont know how." Rogers felt that organizations of any
kind inevitably abused power, that even small groups simply
found it impossible to do right. He reasoned that only by
rejecting power and refusing even to recognize its symbols
could the righteous man escape its demonic clutches. Accord-
ingly, he urged that anti-slavery meetings be conducted with-
out officers, notes, rules of order, or parliamentary procedure.
He favored a return to the Quaker idea of "the sense of the
meeting," and chided Garrison for his failure to avoid all the
pitfalls of politics. "Garrison holds politics a mortal sin — yet
he fills his paper with the doings of politicians, & censures
them for not turning their politics to better account. And he
holds to embodying the anti-slavery movement in real po-
litical form— with all the formalities of parliament or Con-
gress." For Rogers, moral suasion meant "mere speech." "Tell
the truth. Let everybody tell it — & in their own way. And
if they transcend propriety — tell them so & if they wont
conform, let them go unconformed. That's my sort of moral
suasion. Any thing short of it is mxr." Rogers reached the
peak of disorganization when he discovered the immorality of
treasuries and budgets and suggested that henceforth anti-
slavery lecturers support themselves like Buddhist monks with
begging bowl.

"NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS" 321

In Stephen Symonds Foster and Parker Pillsbury, Rogers
found two disciples worthy of his mettle. Foster was un-
doubtedly the most aggressive and humorless reformer ever
to grace the anti-slavery stage. He was born in New Hamp-
shire in 1809, the ninth of thirteen children of a dirt-poor
farmer. He put himself through Dartmouth, and as a student
there was jailed for refusing to perform militia service. Hauled
off to the town lock-up, he sat down and wrote a blistering
letter to the authorities complaining of the vermin and the
filth and was rewarded by seeing the warden dismissed. This
was the approach to reform which he employed with varying
success for the next twenty years. After finishing his course
at Union Seminary in New York, he held a Congregational
pulpit until 1839, when he left the church in disgust and
joined the Garrisonians. He was a born trouble-shooter, a
crank, and a monomaniac on the subject of free speech. "I
could wish that bro. Foster would exercise more judgment
and discretion in the presentation of his views," Garrison
complained after Foster's epithets had touched off a near riot
in Syracuse, "but it is useless to reason with him, with any
hope of altering his course, as he is firmly persuaded that he
is pursuing the very best course."17 The best course for Fos-
ter was the course of greatest resistance. His favorite mode
of operation was to stride into a church on a Sunday morning
and plant himself in the front pew. He would wait until time
for the sermon and then rise and ask in a resonant tone to be
heard in the name of three millions of suffering humanity.
Usually he was tossed out. Once in Portland, Maine, he landed
in the street and broke his collarbone. In Concord he was
kicked down the aisle out into the street and beaten. The next
day he appeared in court, bandaged but unrepentant, to re-
fuse to answer to charges of disturbing the peace. He did
admit to disturbing the uneasy peace of the American church,

322 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

however, and believed that the ends justified any means. Sup-
pose a church were on fire, he asked, would he then be right
in interrupting the service to tell the congregation? What
then if the whole nation were on fire? ... At this point his
lecture frequently ended in violence. If not, then he pro-
ceeded to single out the minister for comparison with a re-
cently executed criminal or liken his congregation to the
patrons of the local house of ill fame. In 1843 he collected
some of these pungent observations in a seventy-two-page
pamphlet entitled The Brotherhood of Thieves: or, a True
Picture of the American Church and Clergy. The title was
the least offensive statement in the book.

Foster finally discovered a kindred spirit in Abby Kelley
and married her in 1845. Until then his partner in disorder
was Parker Pillsbury, another master of the art of conversion
by attrition. Pillsbury was a native of Massachusetts who
had left the Congregational Church and gravitated into
Rogers's orbit in New Hampshire. He was gentler and more
intelligent than his traveling companion, but he too delighted
in setting the pulpit "into a pretty considerable kind of a
fix." Together Pillsbury and Foster took the new gospel of
Gome-Outer abolitionism into every roadside village in New
Hampshire and then ventured farther afield into Massachu-
setts and Connecticut. "Our influence is fast becoming a
source of terror to the pro-slavery pulpit if not to the pro-
slavery parties," they reported gleefully to Garrison, "and
no pains are spared by men in high places to brand our most
active and devoted friends as 'heretics/ "infidels/ and 'dis-
honest men.' "1S

No one in the Boston circle thought Foster and Pillsbury
worse than mountebanks. Ellis Gray Loring, before he left
the Garrisonians in despair, wanted it clearly understood that
he did not discuss anti-slavery in Foster's language. Phillips,

NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS 323

who could employ the barbed word to advantage, thought
both were needlessly aggressive. So did Quincy and Francis
Jackson. Even Garrison agreed that Foster, at least, was "mor-
bidly combative." The Gome-Outers made common cause
with the older radicals like Henry Wright and Abby Kelley,
and forming a nucleus of radical pacificism, they began to
challenge the hegemony of the Bostonians. At the New Eng-
land Convention in 1841 they fought Garrison's resolution,
which simply spoke of the clergy as "wickedly preeminent,"
and substituted one of their own, calling it a "BROTHERHOOD
OF THIEVES." Later that same year they recommended that
abolitionists defeat Jim Crow regulations on the railroads by
taking seats reserved for Negroes. This resolution, introduced
at a quarterly meeting, was finally defeated through the ef-
forts of the Boston clique, but for a while feelings ran high.
Garrison himself warned of the danger of abolitionists be-
coming "invidious and censorious toward each other, in conse-
quence of making constitutional peculiarities virtuous or
vicious traits."19 Word spread among the Gome-Outers that
Garrison was growing "cautious" and "conservative." For
fifteen years there had been no enemies to the Left, but now
his comfortable position on the lunatic fringe of American
politics was threatened by a handful of fanatics chasing the
illusion of purity.

It was not true that Garrison had grown cautious or modi-
fied his demand of the South. The years just before the Mexi-
can War saw the rise within his organization of a new radical-
ism powered by the secessionist energy of Come-Outerism.
Like many men with neither great intelligence nor deep feel-
ings, Garrison was extraordinarily sensitive to the opinions
of others. He realized that the New Hampshire triumvirate
was simply putting his perfectionism into practice and that
Come-Outerism was symptomatic of the gradual dispersion

324 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

of abolitionist strength. Institutional anti-slavery was break-
ing up, a process which Phillips identified when he pointed
out that uthe organization may have met with some check —
but the enterprise is taking stronger & stronger hold of the
public."20 From now on Garrison concerned himself with the
anti-slavery enterprise. The best way of spreading the gospel
now appeared to be the spontaneous local meeting where
itinerant anti-slavery lecturers like Foster and PUlsbury per-
formed in their best Old Testament manner. These meetings
were inexpensive and easily arranged; the agents were gener-
ally satisfied with their meager earnings and content that they
should be "thoroughly understood," as Foster explained, "by
the people to whom alone we now look for support." This
meant going to the people with a moral argument, democra-
tizing anti-slavery and simplifying it even to the point of
distortion. The other alternative after 1840 was political
action which carried the risk of all movements dependent
on votes. Political action meant the Liberty Party, and Garri-
son expressed his opinion of that when he asked how many
votes Jesus of Nazareth cast into the ballot box. The logic
was shocking but his point was unmistakable.

Much of his opposition to the Liberty Party was the prod-
uct of his smoldering hatred for Birney, Leavitt and the other
"apostates" who had walked out of the old society in 1840
taking the Emancipator with them. He never forgave them
this "swindle." When Birney agreed to head the Liberty
Party, Garrison continued to plague him with charges of
being Leavitt's "dupe," a man without "mercenary motives,"
but obviously "not to be relied on in cases of strong tempta-
tion." He accused Birney's followers of being "vandal ene-
mies" who had abandoned true abolition out of "miserable
jealousy" of its leaders. The object of the Liberty Party, he
implied more than once, was not the abolition of slavery but

"NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS" 325

the overthrow of William Lloyd Garrison. It was an organ-
ization "conceived in sin/' "utterly unprincipled," and there-
fore "the most dangerous foe with which genuine anti-slavery
has to contend." Periodically he ran down the list of "defec-
tors" in an editorial, asking the whereabouts of each of them.
Where was James Birney? "In Western 'retiracy,' waiting
to be elected President of the United States, that he may have
the opportunity to do something for the abolition of slavery!"
What was Henry Stanton doing now? "Studying law (which
crushes humanity and is hostile to the gospel of Christ)."
What about Elizur Wright? Where was he? Selling a trans-
lation of French fables he had made. And Whittier and his
friends — all lost to the cause, all bewitched by the sorcery
of political action.21

Lamentations like these were pure hokum and the Liberty
Party men did not hesitate to brand them as such and to
make a few accusations of their own. Garrison, they retorted,
had arrived at a "sublime abstractionism" and was so busy
with keeping his own skirts clear that he ignored the slave.
Suppose all the opponents of slavery were William Lloyd
Garrisons — who would stop the slavocrats from exercising
complete dominion over the whole country?22 More aboli-
tionists each year were apparently reaching similar conclu-
sions, for each year the Liberty Party won more votes until,
in 1844, Birney received over sixty-two thousand. In the
Massachusetts gubernatorial election of the previous year
Samuel Sewall, Garrison's old friend but now a "defector" to
the Liberty Party, received sixty-five hundred votes, while
only one hundred and eight abolitionists followed Garrison's
instructions to "scatter" thek votes. At times like these Garri-
son changed his tone and openly admitted that there was a
"considerable increase" in libery Party strength. "We have
never opposed the formation of a third party as a measure

3 26 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

inherently wrong," he wrote as though to put a new face
on his opposition, "but have always contended that the aboli-
tionists have as clear and indisputable right to band them-
selves together as those who call themselves whigs or demo-
crats."23 It was simply that political action was inexpedient
at this time; an anti-slavery party was premature; there was
still too much "preliminary toil" to be performed.24 Such
statements fooled no one, least of all the Liberty Party.

He came closer to his real objection to the Liberty Party
when he referred to the "partial nature" of its goals and its
concern with the economic and political rather than the moral
aspects of slavery. "Its impolicy in a pecuniary point of view
is dwelt upon far more glowingly than its impiety and im-
morality." Appeals were made to the pocketbook, not to the
conscience, "to the love of political preferment, rather than
the duty of Christian reformation."25 Defenders of the Lib-
erty Party found this reasoning incomprehensible. What use
was moral suasion, they asked, without good works? "With-
out these, we may talk fluently and loudly, may argue and
conclude, may exhort, entreat, rebuke; but nothing of moral
suasion can we employ."26 Principles without the votes to
make them stick seemed to the Liberty men of no use what-
ever.

Not votes but "vindicating the principles of eternal justice"
interested Garrison. He was sure that abolitionists could
never improve on the "apostolic mode" of changing corrupt
institutions, that is, by "the foolishness of preaching." "Hoiv
shall the people be brought to repentance?'9 — this was the
question, and the answer — "Moral suasion ... is the mode
appointed by God to conquer error, and destroy the works
of darkness."27 His language betrayed his old concern with
purity. It was not a matter of laws to be passed or steps to be
taken, but of error to be rooted out and repentance to be

"NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS 3*7

exacted. Again, it was not simply the freedom of the Negro
he sought. He wanted to bring America to its knees, penitent
in sackcloth and ashes, to help it escape sin and death by
destroying evil.

This dream of escape was the source of his interest in all
the other reforms and fads of the Forties — utopianism, per-
fectionism, phrenology, Graham bread, water cures, and
spiritualism. All of these movements offered a form of escape:
utopianism from the injustices of a competitive economy;
perfectionism from the domination of the Church; Graham-
ism from ill-health and neuroses; phrenology and mesmerism
from individual responsibility; spiritualism from the finality
of death. Garrison was involved with all of these movements
in the course of his life but with none more completely than
abolitionism. He was possessed by the image of the shackled
slave because it cried out for Armageddon. An endless fasci-
nation with upheaval was the one constant of his life, the
polestar in the murky rhetoric of his editorials. It explained
the vocabulary of violence, the endless references to "revolu-
tion," "chaos," "blood," and "overthrow." His hatred of
institutions lay deeper than his evangelical bias, deeper even
than his aversion to slavery. For him hostility to the estab-
lished order and the authority it wielded was a fundamental
need. It was of no consequence, he reasoned, that the anti-
slavery pioneers had not envisioned an assault on existing
institutions. They never knew the power of entrenched
wickedness. On the other hand, he had decided to examine
anti-slavery hostility in every institution in the country —
"and if it can be shown that this hostility springs naturally
from the despotic assumptions of such institutions, I do not
see why abolitionists may not assault the institution itself, as
well as its pro-slavery influence — lay the axe at the root of
the tree, as well as cry out against its fruit."28 The institution

328 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

he now marked for destruction was the American Union.

It was the radicals who first explained to Garrison the con-
nection between Come-Outerism and anti-slavery. "One of
two things must be done," Abby Kelley wrote to him in
1843, " — either the American Society and the Mass. Society
must stand on the 'come-outer' ground or I must, as an indi-
vidual, detach myself from them — I must clean my hands
from the blood of the slave that is spilt by support of slavery
in church and in state."29 By 1843 Garrison was well down
the road to disunion himself, having seen and accepted the
duty which Come-Outerism placed on him. As early as
November, 1841, at the height of the petition debate in Con-
gress, he addressed an open letter to the "desperadoes" of the
South informing them that they might leave the Union when-
ever they chose. "They ought not to be allowed seats in
Congress," he decided. "No political, no religious co-partner-
ship should be had with them. ... So far as we are con-
cerned, we 'dissolved the Union' with them, as slaveholders,
the first blow we aimed at their nefarious slave system. We
do not acknowledge them to be within the pale of Christian-
ity, of republicanism, of humanity."30 Privately he told
friends that disunion was only a question of time and that
the bloody-minded South could only be brought to terms
through terrible retribution.

On January 12, 1842, John Quincy Adams presented to the
House a petition signed by Benjamin Emerson and forty-five
citizens of Haverhill, Massachusetts — all Democrats with
Locof oco principles — praying that the Union might be speed-
ily dissolved. The petition was not the first of its kind to
reach the House: Adams reminded Robert Barnwell Rhett
of South Carolina that not long ago he had offered a similar
appeal. This fact did not deter the Southern bloc from threat-

"NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS" 329

ening a vote of censure, but Adams squelched their plans by
recalling that at the trial of Warren Hastings, Burke spoke
for a month. Two weeks after Adams's skirmish Garrison
and his Massachusetts Society held a rally in Faneuil Hall to
unroll the Irish Petition signed by famed Daniel O'Connell
and seventy thousand Irishmen urging their American breth-
ren to support the abolitionists. In the course of the meeting
Garrison offered three incendiary resolutions. The first pro-
vided that Massachusetts Senators and Representatives who,
like Adams, were denied their rights in Congress, "ought at
once to withdraw to their homes." His second resolution pro-
claimed the Union "a hollow mockery," and a third an-
nounced the time approaching "when the American Union
will be dissolved in form as it is now in fact."31 To George
Benson he wrote that he was both

an Irish Repealer and an American Repealer. I go for the repeal
of the Union between England and Ireland, and for the repeal of
the Union between North and South. We must dissolve all con-
nexion with those murderers of fathers, and murderers of
mothers, and murderers of liberty and traffickers in human flesh,
and blasphemers against the Almighty, at the South. What have
we in common with them? What have we gained, what have we
not lost, by our alliance with them? Are not their principles,
their pursuits, their policies, their interests, their designs, their
feelings, utterly diverse from ours? Why, then, be subject to their
dominion? Why not have the Union dissolved in form, as it is
in fact — especially if the form gives ample protection to the
slave system by securing for it all the physical force of the North?
It is not treason against the cause of liberty to cry 'Down with
every slaveholding Union!' And, O, that I had a voice louder
than a thousand thunders, that it might shake the land and elec-
trify the dead! — the dead in sin, I mean —those skin by the hand
of slavery.32

330 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

The more he studied it the more compelling the idea of
Northern secession became. In an editorial in April, 1842, he
reverted to the haunting childhood nightmare of the ship-
wreck. "It is now settled beyond all controversy," he wrote,
"that this nation is out on a storm-tossed sea, without com-
pass, or chart, or rudder, and with the breakers of destruction
roaring all around her. . . . They who would be saved must
gird themselves with life-preservers, and be prepared to fill
the life-boat without delay." Escape to Eden while there is
still time, he seemed to be saying, make the repeal of the
Union your salvation! Then suddenly he placed a new motto
on the masthead of the editorial column: A REPEAL OF THE

UNION BETWEEN NORTHERN LIBERTY AND SOUTHERN SLAVERY
IS ESSENTIAL TO THE ABOLITION OF THE ONE AND THE PRESER-
VATION OF THE OTHER.

Garrison took his disunion text from the twenty-eighth
chapter of Isaiah: "We have made a covenant with death,
and with hell are we in agreement." The covenant was the
United States Constitution which a whole new group of
Liberty Party theoreticians was expounding as anti-slavery.
As long as he had believed in the possibility of governmental
action in behalf of the slave, Garrison held to the view that
the Founding Fathers had intended to contain and eventually
to abolish slavery. Now that a political party sought to elab-
orate the anti-slavery content of the document, he reversed
his position and denounced the Constitution as a corrupt
bargain. For once, he went to the sources. In the Federalist
Papers he found nothing but exhibitions of profligacy, selfish-
ness, and "a shocking violation of heaven-attested principles."
Ignoring the Northwest Ordinance, he identified the key to
the Constitution as the three-fifths clause, which proved that
the United States was "conceived in sin, and brought forth
in iniquity." No man could innocently support it and no

NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS 331

party cou" ^der it. "The political ballot-box is of Satanic

origin, an V wicked and murderous," he concluded

with regs nstitutional provisions for voting. "We

must ceasi it, or give up our profession of Christi-

anity."33 J md Liberty Party men felt otherwise,

they were is or hypocrites.

Disunion good deal further than most abolitionists,

even loyal Ga., xsonians, were prepared to go. Lydia and
David Child, who had reluctantly assumed joint editorship
of the Standard on the understanding that Garrison would
leave them alone, complained that he was foisting his own
private views on the national society. Following their lead,
that society at its annual meeting in 1 842 refused to consider
the question of disunion as a topic for the usual resolutions.
But the next year Garrison collected enough votes in the
Massachusetts Society to pass his resolution calling for an
end to the Union. "We dissolved the Union by a handsome
vote, after a warm debate," Quincy reported to Webb. The
disunion question, "wrapped up by Garrison in some of his
favorite Old Testament Hebraisms by way of a vehicle," slid
neatly through the assembly.34

The same motion did not fare so well at the annual meet-
ing of the American Society in New York that year. The
chief order of business in 1843 concerned the fate of the
society itself. Some of the members favored disbanding it
on the spot; others were for moving it to Boston for the
reason, as Quincy explained, "that there was literally nobody
in New York but James S. Gibbons who either would or
could act as a member of the Executive Committee." When
the exchanges of opinions grew sharp, someone suggested
in the interests of morale that the matter be turned over to a
committee of twenty-five empowered to decide the question
once and for all. In the committee Garrison, Collins, Foster,

332 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

and Abby Kelley led the faction favoring removal of the so-
ciety to Boston. Quincy, Phillips, and Caroline Weston of
the Boston clique vehemently opposed the move on the
grounds that it was tantamount to disbanding the national
society. There was a noticeable chill when Quincy stiffly sug-
gested that if the move were voted, certain of the "Boston
friends," by which he meant Phillips and himself, might not
continue to support the society. " Garrison dilated his nostrils
like a war-horse, and snuffed at us," Quincy recalled. He said
that of course, if the "Boston friends" were unwilling to take
trouble and responsibility, then there was nothing to do but
get along in the old way. A compromise was worked out,
however, which gave a quorum in the Executive Committee
to Boston so that business meetings might be held there while
nominal headquarters were continued in New York. Garri-
son was forthwith elected president of the American Anti-
Slavery Society. He "nolo episcoparfd" a bit, Quincy noted
maliciously, but ended by accepting the honor gratefully.35
It was the opinion of the society that he made an excellent
presiding officer at public meetings where he was limited to
introducing speakers, but that in debates he did not answer
so well since he was very apt to do all the talking himself.
With Garrison in the president's chair it was only a question
of time before the American Society, like the Massachusetts
organization, should bow before his secessionist will.

The defeat of the friends of the Union within the national
organization came the following year, in 1844. Backed by
his host of New England radicals and upheld by the honors
of his office, Garrison celebrated the tenth anniversary of
the society by completely rewriting the Declaration of Senti-
ments. Henceforth members were pledged to the rallying cry
"No Union with Slaveholders," as well as to renouncing the
Constitution as a covenant with death and an agreement with

NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS 333

hell. The society was further committed to opposing all
political parties and spreading the doctrine that "the strongest
political influence which they can wield for the overthrow
of slavery is, to cease sustaining the existing compact by with-
drawing from the polls, and calmly waiting for a time when
a righteous government shall supersede the institutions of
tyranny/'

Garrison's resolutions and new Declaration of Principles
were accepted by the society only after a minority bitterly
opposed to them had been silenced. Ellis Gray Loring and
David Lee Child, both loyal Whigs, might have been ex-
pected to balk at disunion and so perhaps might the Quakers.
But there were other veterans in the cause, dedicated but
prudent men, who doubted the wisdom of disunion and ob-
jected strongly to the speciousness of the prophet's words.
He answered their objections with another quotation from
Isaiah — "For the Lord spake thus to me with a strong hand,
and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this
people. . . ."

Removed from their political setting, Garrison's statements
stand out in hallucinatory starkness. Yet this kind of moral
absolute was commonplace in the charged atmosphere of the
election year 1844, when voters realized that the admission
of Texas hung in the balance. Thomas Walker Gilmer, Vir-
ginia's favorite son, declared that annexation was absolutely
essential to American security, that only hasty approval could
prevent Great Britain's seizing Texas and abolishing slavery
there. Other Southern spokesmen, holding that any check on
the expansion of slavery would split the Union, argued at the
same time for Senator Robert John Walker's "diffusion
theory" by which annexation was to hasten the end of slav-
ery by "diffusing" the institution throughout the new terri-
tory. Fantasy was in the air and threats of secession abounded.

334 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

At the close of the session in 1843 Adams and twelve other
anti-slavery members of the House issued a circular sum-
marizing the history of the Texas negotiations and warning
that annexation would be identical with dissolution of the
Union. Following their lead, the Whig legislature of Massa-
chusetts passed a resolution (killed by Democratic Governor
Marcus Morton) declaring that annexation could only be
regarded by the people of the Commonwealth as "dangerous
to its continuance in peace, in prosperity, and in enjoyment
of those blessings which it is the object of free government
to secure."36 The gap between the abolitionists and the peo-
ple of the North was beginning to close.

On April 12, 1844, Calhoun, now Secretary of State, signed
the annexation treaty and sent it to the Senate with the ex-
planation that hurried approval was needed to forestall British
interference with slavery in Texas. What was called slavery,
Calhoun added, was in reality a political institution essential
to the peace, safety, and prosperity of those states in the
Union in which it existed. American slaves were better off
than many British or American workmen; and until abolition-
ists on both sides of the Atlantic learned this, they would do
well not to meddle. Calhoun's remarks opened a new phase
of the slavery controversy, the beginning of a close cooper-
ation of Southern politicians and intellectuals in defense of
the "peculiar institution," and in the North a new liaison be-
tween moderate abolitionists and insurgent Whigs. Southern
plans for a quick ratification misfired when Calhoun's rival,
Thomas Hart Benton, in a bid for Senate leadership, detached
enough Southern votes from the annexationist party to defeat
the treaty (June 9, 1844), Folk's election, however, was
correctly interpreted by the South as a mandate for annex-
ation, and on February 27, 1845, the joint resolution adding
the new territory to the Union was accepted by both Houses.

"NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS"*" 335

Three days before he left office President Tyler signed it.

Annexation caught the Massachusetts General Court still
in a refractory mood. It passed resolutions declaring first of
all that there was no precedent for the admission of new
territory by legislative act, and secondly, that in ratifying the
Constitution Massachusetts had never delegated this power
to the federal government. Next it asserted that the joint
resolution violated the Constitution by perpetuating slavery
and extending the unequal ratio of representation over the
new territory. Finally, the legislature announced its readiness
to cooperate with other states in refusing to recognize annex-
ation, and "by every lawful and constitutional measure, to
annul its conditions and defeat its accomplishment."37 If the
General Court's invitation to disobedience did not measure
up to Garrison's standards, it was as close as a group of politi-
cians could come in the year 1845.

Some of these same men crowded into Faneuil Hall one
evening in January, 1845, to attend an Anti-Texas Conven-
tion. Among the delegates was Charles Francis Adams, the
able if antiseptic son of Old Man Eloquent and an articulate
opponent of slavery in his own right. At the moment he was
editor of the Boston Whig, the organ of the younger mem-
bers of the party with strong anti-slavery tendencies. Charles
Sumner, massive and pompous, was there along with the
quieter but equally tenacious Henry Wilson. Also Horace
Mann, a reformer turned politician, and John G. Palfrey,
Harvard professor and editor of the North American Review,
Stephen Phillips, the Salem merchant, and George Hillard.
These men were already growing restive under the leader-
ship of the "Cotton" conservatives in the Whig Party, and it
would not be long before they bolted and took their "Con-
science" platform into the Free Soil Party. This evening,
however, they had met simply to protest the annexation of

3*6 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Texas and listen to speeches. One of the speakers, it was
said, would be Garrison himself.

Waiting his turn on the rostrum, Garrison turned his mind
from these new faces to the other friends he had made in his
fifteen years of agitation. Many of them were gone, their
affection chilled by his wintry righteousness and domineering
manner. The roll call of discarded friends grew each year —
Lundy, now dead, the Tappan brothers, Goodell, Leavitt,
Elizur Wright, the Grimkes and Theodore Weld, Amos
Phelps and John Whittier. More recently, George Bradburn,
gone over to the Whigs, and the Childs — David and Lydia
— no longer able to bear his dictatorial manner. The list of the
rejected and damned would continue to grow — Nathaniel
Rogers, Frederick Douglass, Ellis Gray Loring, finally even
Phillips himself. These new recruits before him this evening
could not make up the loss of tried anti-slavery comrades.
They spoke with respect of his services in the cause and de-
ferred politely to his religious opinions, but they did not agree
with him. He suddenly realized that at the age of forty he
had become the veteran of the anti-slavery movement, almost
the lone figure of virtue and strength he had always wanted
to be.

These disturbing thoughts were drowned in the applause
that welled up and engulfed him as he rose to speak. Not
many in the audience could accept his ideas, but all were
visibly moved by his manner — the ponderous rolling periods,
the mournful pauses, and the flat hard voice rising again to
new charges. His words fell like "fiery rain," Surnner remem-
bered. "We deem it our duty ... no binding force what-
ever . . . the Constitution has been overthrown . . . the
Union has ceased to exist . . . treat the General Government
as a nullity . . . assemble in convention without delay . . ."
The ovation at the end of his speech was a signal not of ap-

NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS 337

probation but of respect. His audience seemed to realize
that though they could never come to like this inflexibly
righteous man, they could not help but respond to his force.
He might well be fanatical — no doubt he exaggerated — but
some of the things he said about the Southern plot to extend
slavery to the Pacific made sense. In the half-light of Faneuil
Hall and the dimness of their growing doubts they sat won-
dering.

Later that year, in October, after the Texas protests had
begun to subside, the Liberator paid its editor's last respects
to the nonresistance cause which was slowly expiring. Non-
resistance and the redemption of the world, Garrison wrote,
were clearly synonymous. "Where it prevails, there can be
no shedding of human blood, no violence, no lawless con-
duct." The cause of peace might have lost its appeal tempo-
rarily but it would never die. In the next column there was
an account of his speech to the Middlesex Anti-Slavery So-
ciety. "Give us but five years to agitate the question of disso-
lution," he had said, "and at the end of that brief period, see
whether we have made any progress in changing public
sentiment. . . * We believe that the dissolution of the Union
must give the death-blow to the entire slave system,"88 Al-
ready he foresaw a revolution which would come complete
with noise and the smoke of guns.

15
Compromise

IN MAY, 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico.
Zachary Taylor spent the Fourth of July that year in the
captured village of Matamoros awaiting reinforcements and
treating his weary soldiers to Mexican cooking and patriotic
speeches. Two thousand miles to the northeast the "beauti-
fully small" troop of loyal Garrisonians gathered in Dedham
Grove to hear their leader's last indictment of the war before
sailing to England. Two weeks later he boarded the Britannia
in Boston Harbor and arrived in Liverpool on July 3 1 for a
reunion with his English friends.

His Boston friends were decidedly unenthusiastic about the
visit, his last before the Civil War. At an Executive Com-
mittee meeting in June they sat by while he quarreled with
young Sydney Gay over the management of the Standard.
The Childs could have told Gay that Garrison would tolerate
no one who showed the least editorial independence. Lydia
said that Garrison's idea of a proper editorial was a preamble
and a dozen resolutions, and that when he went to heaven he
would present Saint Peter with resolutions that protested be-
ing admitted by a traitor who had betrayed his master, a blood-
thirsty villain who cut off the high priest's ears, and a mis-
creant who had been warned thrice by the beast.

His spat with Gay arose over the question of whether

COMPROMISE 339

contributors to the Standard should sign their editorials. He
accused Gay of trying to get credit for editorials he had not
written and of plotting to seize control of the paper. While
he and Gay thrashed out the question of signatures, the rest
of the committee grew more and more glum and did not
brighten when he broached the subject of another pilgrimage
to England. "The poor thing wanted to be stood by and put
through with warmth & energy," Caroline Weston wrote to
her sisters, "but if the board were cataleptic about Sydney,
they were equally so about him."1 Finally Phillips and Quincy
gave in; James Russell Lowell, who had recently joined the
group, withdrew his objections; and Francis Jackson promised
to underwrite the trip. All that was needed was a reason for
going. This he manufactured out of the transgressions of the
Free Church of Scotland which had accepted funds from a
slaveholding Presbyterian congregation in South Carolina. He
left the country in the midst of its first anti-slavery crisis in
order to protest the "foul deed" of the Free Church and
demand that they "Send Back the Money."

Enlightening the Free Church of Scotland, he protested,
required "great exertions." English and Scotch abolitionists,
however, were of the opinion that his services to anti-slavery
would be greater if he confined himself to it instead of letting
fly at the church, the Bible, or any other "great object" that
stood in the way of universal liberty. In London he visited
Thompson and was disturbed to find that he had taken to
using tobacco. "If I can induce him to give up this habit, and
sign the tee-total pledge in regard to snuff," he told his wife,
"I shall feel it worth the expense of coming to London." The
city, which teemed with pubs and prostitutes, shocked him.
Standing in front of the Lord Mayor's house one night, he
was accosted by a handsomely dressed lady of the evening
who gave him "the most earnest glances in a manner revealing

340 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

her desire. . . . After advancing a few steps she turned round,
and in the most insinuating manner acted as though she ex-
pected me to go with her. . . . My heart sank within me to
think of the horrid fate of that unfortunate creature."2 He
was glad that he was a Bostonian.

Frederick Douglass, already on a mission in Scotland, ap-
peared with him at most of his lectures. Together they
toured from London to Edinburgh, Bristol to Belfast, hold-
ing "real old fashioned old-organized meetings" at which
they declared "the whole counsel of God" and handled their
subjects "without mittens."3 Garrison spoke to William Lov-
ett's moral suasion Chartists and interviewed Mazzini, whose
mystical Christian nationalism and romantic temperament fas-
cinated him. In Glasgow his admirers presented him with a
silver tea service. Except for the formation of an Anti-Slavery
League to oppose the conservative Evangelical Alliance, how-
ever, he accomplished little for American reform. Douglass,
on the other hand, received seven hundred dollars from Eng-
lish abolitionists to purchase his freedom. Garrison contributed
his "mite," only to be severely criticized by his followers
back home for recognizing the slave traffic. Such was not
the case, he explained. "Never have I entertained the opin-
ion, for a moment, that it was wrong to ransom one held in
cruel captivity, though I have always maintained, in the case
of the slave, that the demand of the slaveholder for compensa-
tion was unjust."4 He saw no contradiction in denouncing a
claim as unfair while submitting to it in order to save an
individual slave.

It was on occasions like these that his humanitarian feelings
broke the restraints of dogma and sent his principles flying.
In Drogheda on the way to Belfast he was appalled by the
sight of starving Irish children begging by the roadside, and
grew indignant with the Dublin abolitionists who refused

COMPROMISE 341

donations from American slaveholders. "I really think there
is a broad line of demarcation to be drawn between a case in
which money is obtained from the slaveholders solely be-
cause they are first recognized as 'members of the household
of faith,' and that in which it is given voluntarily (as in the
Irish case) without any sanction of slaveholding being either
required, volunteered, or understood."5 Righteous as he
seemed, he was not willing to weigh a moral principle against
the life of a child.

In November he came home bringing with him the silver
tea set on which there was a sixty-dollar duty. The excise
was finally paid by his women friends, but it was enough to
make him a confirmed free-trader who denied the right of
any country "to erect geographical or natural barriers in
opposition to these natural, essential and sacred rights."6 He
would have been surprised to learn that his language as well
as his ideas were those of the South Carolina Exposition.

He returned to a political situation in Massachusetts already
tense with anti-slavery strain. The trouble began in Washing-
ton one evening the previous August when David Wilmot, a
portly young Democrat from Pennsylvania, offered to an
appropriations bill an amendment which closed to slavery all
the territory acquired in the war with Mexico. Passed by the
House, the Wilmot Proviso died in the Senate but not before
it had raised the issue which would dominate American poli-
tics for the next fifteen years. Southern legislatures denounced
it, Northern reformers hailed it as a sign of moral awakening.
In the South there was talk of secession; in the North, of free
men and free soil. The Whig Party could not long with-
stand these sectional pressures, and nowhere was its plight
more obvious than in Massachusetts, where the "Young
Whigs" — Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, John Gotham
Palfrey, Rockwood Hoar, George S. HHlard, Stephen Phil-

342 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

lips and Charles Allen — were rallying around Charles Fran-
cis Adams's free soil Daily Whig. Ever since the declaration
of war Wilson had tried unsuccessfully to put the legislature
on record as opposing the extension of slavery. In the course
of one of the debates his colleague Hoar declared that it was
"as much the duty of Massachusetts to pass resolutions in
favor of the rights of man as in the interests of cotton.'* Hoar's
quip stuck, and from then on the dispute was one between
Cotton and Conscience. At the state convention of the party
in September, 1847, the Conscience faction submitted resolu-
tions opposing slavery "wherever it exists" and pledging
Whigs to "continue in all constitutional measures that can
promote its abolition." When Robert Winthrop's Cotton fac-
tion defeated their bid for an anti-slavery platform, the Young
Whigs retired to await the coming of a Presidential year.

Garrison was excited by the sudden appearance of an anti-
slavery Whig bloc as well as by the Wilmot Proviso, which
he immediately claimed as an abolitionist triumph. It was true
that Wilmot's majority had dwindled away when the appro-
priations bill was finally passed and that the war went on
despite the opposition of New England. Yet every day more
people in the North were becoming convinced of what James
Russell Lowell's crusty Hosea Biglow called "the over-
reachin* o' them nigger-drivin' states." When the discouraged
Wilmot asked if the North would ever find its courage and
its voice, the answer came from his own colleagues. Robert
McClelland of Michigan warned that slavery would expand
"wherever man, in his cupidity and lust for power can carry it."
David Brinkerhoff of Ohio asked whether the extension of
slavery "at which posterity will blush, which Christianity
must abhor," ought to be the work of representatives of free
men. A Representative from Alabama deplored these "ill-
starred agitations" which were disrupting the normal business

COMPROMISE 343

of the House but he could not stop them. Garrison appkuded
the new freedom of debate in Congress. Now any Northerner
could speak out against slavery and be heard.

His opposition to the war mounted as the months passed:
he prayed for "success to the injured Mexicans and over-
whelming defeat to the United States."7 He went further
and outlined a defeatist program for the Garrisonians "now
boldly and continually to denounce the war, under such
circumstances, as bloody and iniquitous — to impeach the gov-
ernment and the administration — to wish success to the Mexi-
cans as the injured party, who are contending for their fire-
sides and their country against enslaving and remorseless
invaders/'8 Let the abolitionists' testimony burn as never be-
fore into the national conscience. It no longer mattered that
his organization lay in shambles and his admirers grew fewer
each year, for he was convinced that his little remnant was
slowly gaining ascendancy over the public mind. Whigs and
Democrats still feared disunion like the plague, but they
would come to it soon enough. Meanwhile he could afford
to wait.

Control of the national organization as well as the Massa-
chusetts Society now rested with the Boston clique, who were
beginning to exert a new influence over their leader. Gone
was the fiery zeal of the Gome-Outers. Rogers had died worn
out by a factional dispute with the Bostonians and disillu-
sioned by Garrison's unwillingness to accept all the implica-
tions of Christian anarchy. Henry Wright had virtually aban-
doned anti-slavery for anti-Sabbatarianism. Stephen Symonds
Foster was losing his martyr complex in marriage, and Parker
Pillsbury had settled on a less hazardous manner of spreading
the gospel. The backfires of religious radicalism were smolder-
ing out, and the decisions were now made in camera around

344 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

the polished grates in Essex Street drawing rooms according
to Phillips's advice "to have only a few/'0

By 1847 ^e Liberty Party was foundering. If abolition
embarrassed the politicians, politics was proving the undoing
of abolitionists. In the previous year the state of New York
called a convention to write a new constitution. Some of the
Liberty Party men, who hoped to win broader suffrage for
Negroes, decided to advocate alliances with Whigs and Demo-
crats in return for the promise of support for an extended
franchise. Birney refused to have anything to do with the
scheme and warned his followers of the danger of entangling
alliances. The new state constitution bore out his warnings:
by its terms Negroes were not considered in the apportion-
ment of representation, and a property qualification was estab-
lished large enough to disqualify almost every Negro in the
state.

The New York constitutional convention merely under-
scored a problem which had troubled the political abolitionists
from the beginning, the question of a platform. They knew
that they could never build a successful party merely by
pledging members not to vote for pro-slavery candidates. But
to pile the anti-slavery platform with a stack of new planks —
anti-bank, anti-tariff, anti-Masonry — was to risk toppling the
whole structure. Many of the Liberty Party men, however,
shared the business ethic of the small entrepreneur; and to
them the advantages of combining anti-slavery and a small
businessman's credo seemed obvious. A group of schismatics
tinder the leadership of William Goodell formed the Liberty
League in June, 1847, and proceeded to write a platform that
included land reform, free trade, abolition of monopolies,
direct taxation, and prohibition of secret societies along with
the usual anti-slavery plank. The Liberty League promptly
nominated Gerrit Smith for President of the United States.

COMPROMISE 345

It was a measure of the confusion besetting political abolition-
ists in 1847 that Smith, who less than a year before had
vehemently opposed broadening the platform, accepted the
nomination while continuing to work with the old Liberty
Party. He paid for his indecision when the Liberty Party
Convention in the fall of 1847 defeated his attempt to intro-
duce some of the League's ideas and gave the Presidential
nomination to John P. Hale of New Hampshire. From both
Smith's point of view and that of the Liberty Party itself it
looked as though political abolitionists would never succeed in
uniting on an anti-slavery program.

Garrison was delighted with the dissension in the Liberty
Party. He decided to help kill the political dragon and then
display the carcass on a tour throughout the Mississippi Val-
ley. Before leaving Boston he prepared for his mission by
attacking the Liberty League in a series of editorials as a
hopelessly unrealistic venture. Its nominees, he noted malici-
ously, might as well conclude at the outset that a private
station was a post of honor. The Liberty Party with its doc-
trine of the unconstitutionality of slavery, however, was a
more serious matter. He pointed out that Birney, Smith, and
Goodell had originally denied the power of Congress to inter-
fere with slavery but now unaccountably were reversing
their position. "And should that party succeed at any time in
electing to Congress a majority of Senators and Representa-
tives, does it mean to pass a law, and of course to enforce
the law, declaring slavery to be unlawful on any portion of
American soil?"10 This would mean disunion, yet anything
short of it was abject surrender to the slavocracy. Why not
go the whole way by accepting the logic of Northern seces-
sion?

To find this answer, he started west in August, 1847, taking
with him Frederick Douglass, who had reasons of his own

346 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GABHISON

for going. English abolitionists had suggested the advantages
of an American anti-slavery newspaper edited by a Negro;
and Douglass, realizing that the seaboard was oversupplied
with competing abolitionist journals, wanted to investigate
Cleveland as a site for his paper. Garrison received the project
coldly, for he wanted no new rival either in Massachusetts
or Ohio. He tried to convince Douglass that his talent lay
in lecturing, but the headstrong Douglass immediately sus-
pected his motives. The tour put a severe strain on their
friendship.

They stopped first in Norristown for the tenth anniversary
meeting of the Eastern Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society,
one of the last of the Garrisonian redoubts. Although Garri-
son and Lucretia Mott spoke long and forcibly, Douglass was
the star attraction. He gave a sharp and pungent exposition
of secessionist doctrine, not even pausing when a gang of
rowdies began to smash the windows of the meetinghouse.
On the trip from Philadelphia to Harrisburg they got an-
other taste of racial prejudice which made them realize how
tolerant New England really was. Douglass had taken a place
in the rear of the railroad car instead of the customary spot
near the door. Suddenly, he was dragged from his seat and
tossed into the aisle by a drunken lawyer who threatened to
knock his teeth down his throat. He got slowly to his feet
and methodically dusted himself off. Then, staring con-
temptuously at his assailant, he told him that only the ob-
vious fact that he was no gentleman saved him from a duel
with any weapons he might choose. The nonresistant Garri-
son suffered an uneasy moment before the lawyer mumbled
another insult and returned to his seat.

Harrisburg lived up to its reputation as a pro-slavery town.
Garrison was allowed to finish his lecture, but the minute
the "nigger" rose to speak, the hostile audience sprang to

COMPROMISE 347

life. It was the most violent demonstration Garrison had seen
since the Boston riot. "They came equipped with rotten eggs
and brickbats, firecrackers and other missiles, and made use
of them somewhat freely/' he wrote to Helen, " — breaking
panes of glass, and soiling the clothes of some who were
struck by the eggs. One of these bespattered my head and
back somewhat freely."11 Douglass was struck with a brick-
bat; Garrison escaped with only a moist head.

A happier reception awaited them in Pittsburgh, where
there was a sizable colony of free Negroes. A twenty-piece
band waited until three o'clock in the morning to serenade
Douglass on his arrival, and he had to speak five times in
three days. His strong baritone voice began to give out; by
the end of the tour he could hardly croak. Garrison also
drove himself hard, speaking several times a day and then
conversing endlessly with his hosts after his performances.
Following an unsatisfactory meeting in New Brighton, Penn-
sylvania, the two jaded lecturers were joined by Stephen
Foster, fresh from the East, and the threesome moved on to
New Lyme, Ohio, for a three-day meeting with the Western
Anti-Slavery Society. The Western Society was the lone
outpost of Garrisonism in Ohio. Its members had decided to
pit their leader and his secessionist ideas against the poEtical
anti-slavery of Joshua Giddings. Giddings had been a young
country lawyer when Weld converted him to abolition and,
once elected to Congress, he joined John Quincy Adams in
fighting for the right of petition. He was a durable contestant,
not brilliant, but stubborn and opinionated. At the time of the
Creole affair he showed his contempt for a threatened Whig
vote of censure by resigning his seat, standing for re-election,
and triumphantly returning to the House. Giddings was
neither a profound anti-slavery theoretician nor an especially
acute parliamentarian, but his rough-and-ready style of de~

348 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

bate and his devotion to free soil principles made him just the
man to force Garrison to define and defend disunion.

As he first explained it, Garrison's doctrine of disunion was
a pure moral abstraction devoid of practical considerations.
"Friends of liberty and humanity must immediately withdraw
from the compact of bloody and deceitful men, to cease
striking hands with adulterers." Nothing more. Given as an
ultimatum from God, disunion was as empty of specifics as a
Cartesian proposition. Though he insisted that his doctrine
was one of "order and obedience," he had, in fact, not a
formula but a letter of marque from God. Faith in God ob-
viated the need for a plan. "The form of government that
shall succeed the present government of the United States,"
he wrote in 1844, "let time determine."12 It would be a waste
of effort to argue the question until all the people were
regenerated and turned from their iniquity. Meanwhile the
value of secessionist agitation lay in arousing the North, and
convulsing the South by showing it the enormity of its sin.

The Mexican War put secession in a new light, and gradu-
ally he began to think of it as a practical solution to the slavery
problem. "We do not think any one state will go out of the
Union alone," he wrote in May, 1847. "The movement will
be simultaneous throughout New England, and probably
throughout all the non-slaveholding states," First a line would
be drawn separating slave from free states. The Southern
states would have to combine into a confederacy, "for, aside
from the appalling fact that she would have three millions of
enemies in her midst, smarting from numberless wrongs and
outrages, how would she be able to prevent the escape of any
indefinite number of her slaves to the new republic?" Even a
Southern confederacy could not hold its slaves, who would
"leap in the twinkling of an eye, and be beyond the reach
of danger." What state would then be willing to be a border

COMPROMISE 349^

state? "Each would inevitably be compelled to emancipate
all the slaves on its soil; and then the same necessity would
be imposed upon the States next in geographical position;
and this would lead to a general and peaceful abolition
throughout the entire South."13 So he argued now to the dis-
may of Joshua Giddings and his Ohio farmers. Giddings
proved kind and generous, but Garrison thought his argu-
ments specious and reported to Helen that he had with him
"the understanding and conscience" of the overwhelming
majority.

At Oberlin, where he stopped for a few days, he examined
the wilderness college and met the famous Dr. Finney. He
was pleased to see the evangelistic enterprise flourishing but
objected to Oberlin's ecclesiastical leanings which tended to
"impair the strength of its testimony, and diminish the power
of its example." Finney surprised him, however, by telling
the graduating class that they must be "anti-devil all over"
and join all the reforms of their age. Garrison debated dis-
union again, this time with crusty Asa Mahan, whose opinions
he found "perfectly respectable" but "neither vigorous nor
profound."14 He left for Cleveland satisfied with the effect
of peaceable secession on the college.

The feverish pace and the intense heat of the Midwestern
summer were taking their toll Garrison's agents had arranged
three and sometimes four lectures a day, often twenty miles
apart. He spoke in steaming lecture halls and damp pine
groves, wherever he could collect an audience, and when
Douglass's voice gave out, he substituted for him. "My labors,
for the last four weeks, had been excessive — in severity far
exceeding anything in my experience. Too much work was
laid out for both Douglass and myself, to be completed in so
short a time; yet it was natural that our Ohio friends should
wish to 'make the most of us' whilst we were in their hands."15"

350 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

He was to remain in their hands for two more months: in
Cleveland he fell desperately ill with what a homeopathic
surgeon called an "intermittent fever with a tendency towards
typhoid." For nearly six weeks he lay in the house of his
Cleveland friends too weak to move. Meanwhile Douglass
left for Syracuse and Rochester to scout out a site for his
newspaper. When Garrison recovered and found that he had
been abandoned in his illness for a project of which he
strongly disapproved, he was furious with Douglass and com-
plained bitterly of his "impulsive, inconsiderate and highly
inconsistent" behavior.16 In November he was enough better
to come home to Boston, but once arrived suffered a relapse
and remained invalided until the first of the year.

Once he recovered from his Western tour he plunged
into still another conference, this one an Anti-Sabbath Con-
vention at Theodore Parker's Melodeon to help protest what
Parker called the fierce "this-worldliness" of New England.
Garrison and Parker, despite the great intellectual gulf be-
tween them, were kindred souls. Parker had been converted
to abolition largely by the example of Garrison and his fol-
lowers and had also succumbed to the pull of universal re-
form. He had attended the Chardon Street Convention and
now heartily approved of another such meeting to destroy the
superstition and cant which kept the masses "in their present
low state."17 He had no fear of revolutions, he told Garrison;
Americans had conservative principles enough.

Most of the Garrisonians rallied to the call. Phillips refused
to attend, and Quincy was annoyed with Garrison for chasing
the will-o'-the-wisp of theological problems instead of con-
centrating on slavery. "It really seems as if the Devil always
would put his foot in it," he complained, "whenever the anti-
slavery cause has got into a tolerable position, so as to keep it

COMPROMISE 351

in hot water."18 He signed the call anyway, protesting all the
while against Garrison's private idiosyncrasies.

For Garrison the very existence of Massachusetts blue laws
was challenge enough. His call to "The Friends of Civil and
Religious Liberty" presented still another preamble and a
long list of resolutions attacking a "Sabbatizing clergy" and
its "merely ceremonial religion." The convention debated his
propositions with imagination and gusto, although the mem-
bers could agree on nothing more than a general disapproval
of Sunday laws. The accounts in the Liberator, however, and
its editor's vendetta against an "arrogant priesthood" sug-
gested nothing less than a theological revolution.

He was discovering that the right of private judgment in
theological matters led straight to rationalism. The problem
of the age as he saw it was that of winnowing the chaff of
superstitition from the grain of Christian ethics. In the case
of dogma this seemed simple enough. He rejected the phrase
"Mother of God" as absurd and blasphemous. "If Mary was
the mother of God, who was the father of God?" He also
objected to the verse in Wesley's hymn which began "O love
divine! what hast thou done? /The immortal God hath died
for me!" as a contradiction in terms. The question of Chris-
tian ethics, he admitted, posed greater difficulty. He insisted
that the "wine" mentioned in the Bible was unfermented
grape juice, but argued that "the expediency, the morality of
wine-drinking is not to be settled by an appeal to any book."
His case for abstinence rested on "chemical analysis" and the
moral consequences of imbibing. The same was true of all the
obligations of men to their fellow men, which were "in no
degree affected by the question whether miracles were
wrought in Judea or not, with whatever interest that question
may be invested."11*

It was probably Theodore Parker who first led Garrison

352 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

to re-examine the doctrine of plenary inspiration. Parker's
was a mind tougher and better trained than any he had found
yet, and his "applied Christianity" struck an immediate chord
of response. Parker believed that there had been three ages
in the world, the age of sentiment, the age of ideas, and the
age of action. In failing to socialize Christianity the church
lagged behind the growth of modern institutions. The first
task for Christians in the new age, he believed, was to disabuse
themselves of superstition. Garrison was greatly impressed with
the "Christ-like" arguments of Parker. In an editorial attack-
ing plenary inspiration he spoke of the Bible for the first
time as the product of many minds. "To say that everything
contained within the lids of the Bible is divinely inspired, and
to insist upon the dogma as fundamentally important, is to
give utterance to a bold fiction, and to require the suspension
of the reasoning faculties. To say that everything in the Bible
is to be believed, simply because it is found in that volume,
is equally absurd and pernicious."20 It was for the reason to
search the Scriptures and decide what was true or false,

If Garrison's ideas seemed saturated with the musty air of
eighteenth-century deism, it was because he took them from
Tom Paine, whom he had always believed "a monster of
iniquity." Reading Paine proved a stimulating experience for
one recently delivered from "the thralldom of tradition and
authority." Paine taught him to apply the "test of just criti-
cism," to measure the Bible by the standards of reason and
utility, the facts of science, historical confirmation, and "the
intuition of the spirit." When Garrison accepted Professor
Benjamin Silliman's findings as proof that the Mosaic cos-
mogony was untenable, he stood in the best deist tradition.
Like Paine, he accepted the Enlightenment fiction derived from
Newton that the physical and social worlds were governed by
identical laws. The Bible, he now believed, must reinforce the

COMPROMISE 353

findings of "human experience." By "human experience/' how-
ever, he meant no such rigid intellectualisin as Paine envisioned,
but a "felt experience," a testimony of the heart, an intuition
wholly compatible with his orthodox upbringing. His was
the kind of pseudo-rationalism that allowed for no real doubts
as to the superiority of Christianity but only objected to the
manner in which its truths were received. His hatred of insti-
tutions and authority blinded him to the real conflict be-
tween faith and reason and limited his revolt to a petty war
against a weakened church and outworn doctrine. Had he
been able to advance beyond this point and see the forces of
historicism at work, he might have achieved a serviceable
rationalist critique based on associational and environmental
psychology. Clearly this was too much for a mind which
drew its strength not from intellect but from will.

Insofar as he thought about philosophy at all Garrison
intuitively held that there were fundamental laws of human
nature instinctively grasped that told men what was right.
Thus all the people really needed was conscience. Paine's
deism, superficial as it might have been, had the merit of
being militantly anti-clerical and frankly revolutionary. When
Paine joined the French Revolution to fight for the rights of
man, he was following his premises to their logical conclu-
sion. He identified religious superstition with corrupt Euro-
pean monarchy, and reason with New World democracy.
Paine's easy assumptions were no longer valid at a time when
the separation of religion and politics in America was almost
complete. It was just this separation of religious protest from
political radicalism, of free thought from class conflict, that
gutted Garrisonism of its revolutionary content. In Europe
after the French Revolution anti-clericalism joined the social
revolution; in America free thought grew up a peaceable
citizen. Garrison typified this American penchant for com-

354

THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

bining reason and religion into a belief no more revolutionary
than social gospelism. He personified the dilemma of the
religions radical in America, the avowed nonrevolutionary
who, despite himself, made a revolution.

The year 1848 opened on a note of hope every where-
in Paris, where the monarchy was broken on the barricades,
in Berlin, London and Vienna, To most Americans it seemed
as though they had finally succeeded in exporting their own
revolutionary example, that Europe had finally accepted the
blessings of democracy. Garrison shared their conviction.
"The republican form of government is triumphantly estab-
lished in France," he announced after the February Days.
"It is, however, but the beginning of the end — and that end
is the downfall of every throne in existence within a score of
years."21 When the June Days brought the inevitable dis-
illusionment, he was too busy studying the revolution in the
American party system to notice the failure of liberalism in
Europe. The Free Soil revolt, though it too proved abortive,
planted the slavery issue in the center of American politics,
where it remained until the Civil War.

Both Whigs and Democrats faced the election of 1848 with
dissension in their ranks. Democratic unrest centered in up-
state New York, where the party was divided into two war-
ring factions — Hunkers and Barnburners. The Barnburners
were a curious combination of idealists and opportunists.
Some of them were simply disgruntled politicians nursing
hopes of regaining lost patronage; but there were others like
Preston King, David Dudley Field and William CuHen Bryant,
the able editor of the N&w York Evening Post, who were
moderate abolitionists ready to oppose the Hunkers on the
question of extending slavery. In Pennsylvania, the Democrats
faced incipient rebellion from Wilmot and his friends, and in
Ohio, Salmon P. Chase threatened party regulars with revolt

COMPROMISE ^ 355

When the Democratic Convention met in May and nominated
the expansionist Cass, the Barnburners walked out. Led by
the wily "Prince John" Van Buren and harboring a number
of patronage-minded party hacks, the dissident wing of the
Democracy nevertheless formed the center of anti-slavery
feeling that soon produced the Free Soil Party.

The other two sources of the Free Soil movement were
two pockets of Whig discontent, one in Massachusetts and
the other in Ohio. Horace Greeley warned his fellow Whigs
at the beginning of the year that if they nominated Taylor,
they would elect him but destroy the Whig Party. Greeley
was right. Beaten by the regulars at the nominating conven-
tion, the "Young Whigs" bolted and held their own conven-
tion at Worcester. Insurgent Whigs in Ohio held a similar
meeting, where they called for a national convention at
Buffalo. The Free Soil roster was completed when the rem-
nants of the Liberty Party gave up their candidates and a
strong anti-slavery plank to join the insurgent Whigs and
Democrats.

Like all American third party movements, the Free Soil
Party was an amalgam of high-mindedness and chicanery. Its
platform was clear enough: slavery was declared a state rather
than a national institution and as such must be excluded from
the territories. In their selection of a candidate, however, the
old campaigners showed their mastery of the art of political
jugglery. The Liberty Party men were reluctant to give up
their candidate Hale, but the Conscience Whigs, who held the
balance of power and were hungry for votes, swung the
nomination to Van Buren. Before ten thousand spectators
in Buffalo's City Park the Free Soilers tied their political for-
tunes to "free soil, free speech, free labor, free men," and the
slightly shopworn reputation of "Little Van."

Garrison was vacationing at Northampton with his brother-

356 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

in-law when the Free Soilers launched their series of rallies
in Massachusetts. He went to one of them and was surprised
to find many of his old colleagues there. The North, he told
them, had missed its best chance to abolish slavery when
Texas was annexed. The Free Soil platform was weaker than
a spider's web — "a single breath of the Slave Power will
blow it away." Yet if Free Soil fell far short of disunion, it
was still a step toward it and perhaps the beginning of the
end. His problem, therefore, was how to give the Free Soilers
due credit without sanctioning their principles. The danger
lay in the temptation they offered to loyal abolitionists to
bow down just this once in the house of Rimmon and vote.
"Calm yet earnest appeals," he announced, "must be made to
our friends to preserve their integrity, and not lose sight of the
true issue."22

Whatever the issues, the results of the election of 1848
were never in doubt. When the Northern Whig leaders
reluctantly swung their support behind Taylor, his victory
was assured. He and Cass each carried fifteen states, but
Taylor won Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and
140,000 more votes than his opponent. The Free Soil Party
received 300,000 votes and nine seats in Congress, and in
Massachusetts it ran ahead of the Democratic ticket. Garrison
misjudged its strength but not its significance. Free Soil
brought an end to the uneasy truce between North and
South.

There was another leader worried about the behavior of
his followers in the election year of 1848. John C Calhoun
took the occasion of his visit to Charleston in the summer to
apprise his constituents of a Northern plot to exclude slavery
from all of the territories. How could South Carolina decide
between a Michigan Democrat and an uncommitted Whig?
Let the state ignore the Presidential canvass and await the

COMPROMISE 357

course of events. If the North was not to be deterred from
the path of aggression, the South would unite under the
leadership of South Carolina into a great Southern republican
party based on slavery. Calhoun's advice was not lost on the
New England press. The Boston Recorder, noting the similar-
ity of Garrison's and Calhoun's solutions, remarked that "the
Garrison faction ought to admire Mr. Calhoun for he is aim-
ing at the same object with them, though with a thousand
times more energy and likelihood of effecting their wishes/'
Calhoun had forty Congressmen to do his bidding, and Garri-
son not one.23

Calhoun's Congressmen were deployed soon after the sit-
ting of the new Congress to meet the attack of the Free
Soilers. On December 1 1, 1848, the Free Soilers in the House
introduced a resolution instructing the proper committee
to bring in a bill prohibiting the slave trade in the Dis-
trict of Columbia. This move sent the Southern Congress-
men scurrying into caucus, from which they emerged with
Calhoun's "Address of the Southern Delegates to Congress to
their Constituents" calling for a Southern convention. As
propaganda Calhoun's "Southern Address" was a masterpiece;
as prophecy it showed the clear but tragic vision of a dying
man. The South, he predicted, would never give up slavery
voluntarily. When emancipation came, it would be forced
on the South by a federal government dominated by North-
erners. "It can then only be effected by the prostration of the
white race; and that would necessarily engender the bitterest
feelings of hostility between them and the North." Garri-
son's prediction had not changed, but for once his certainty
allowed him to be brief. "Our Disunion ground is invulner-
able, and to it all parties at the North must come ere long."24

In the aftermath of the Mexican War it seemed that Garri-
son and Calhoun spoke the mood of the nation as it ap~

3 $8 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

proached the problems of administering the new territory.
The proposals for its disposition were various, but the lan-
guage in which they were discussed was surprisingly similar.
Robert Toombs of Georgia, hitherto considered a moderate,
lashed out at the Free Soilers who refused to abandon the
Wilmot Proviso. "I do not hesitate to avow before this House
and the country, and in the presence of a living God, that
if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the Territories
and to abolish slavery in the District, I am for disunion; and
if my physical courage be equal to the maintenance of my
convictions of right and duty, I will devote all I am and all I
have to its consummation." When Edward D. Baker of Illinois
denied the possibility of peaceful secession, Alexander Ste-
phens countered with an ultimatum. "I tell that gentleman,
whether he believes it or not, that the day in which aggression
is consummated on any portion of the country, this Union
is dissolved." Salmon Chase replied for the Free Soilers by
reminding Southerners that "no menace, no resolves tending
to disunion, no intimations of the probability of disunion, in
any form, will move us from the path which, in our judg-
ment, it is due to ourselves and the people we represent to
pursue." Edward Everett, hardly an abolitionist, wrote to
his friend Nathan Appleton that peaceful separation held
the only answer to the slavery question.

Public opinion in both sections of the country rushed
ahead of Congressional threats. The Sumter (South Carolina)
Banner called for "SECESSION OF THE SLAVEHOLDING STATES IN

A BODY FROM THE TJNION AND THEIR FORMATION INTO A

SEPARATE REPUBLIC." The editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer
declared that rather than see slavery extended a single inch
"we would see this Union rent asunder." "The North," re-
ported another Ohio paper, "is determined that slavery shall
not pollute the soil of lands now free . . . even if it should

COMPROMISE

come to a dissolution, of the Union." Thus, at a time when
his apparently irresponsible doctrine of disunion and a suicidal
policy of proscription had reduced his society to a mere
skeleton, Garrison's secessionist ideas were reflected in and
beginning to color the national mood. If a majority of Ameri-
cans in the North and the South refused to accept disunion
and tried to ignore the abolitionists and the fire-eaters, it was
because the slavery issue remained an abstraction, not unreal
but remote. For most Northerners in 1850 slavery was already
a moral issue, but one to be met obliquely by a policy of
containment rather than head-on by immediate emancipation.
This was the cautious attitude which Clay and Douglas
brought to the Thirty-first Congress and the drafting of a
compromise. Clay's ill-starred Omnibus Bill, the basis of the
Compromise of 1850, was an attempt to meet both Free Soil
objectives and Southern expansionist aims. As finally passed
piecemeal by Congress it favored the South. The final com-
promise provided for the admission of a free California and
established governments in the rest of the territory; it as-
sumed the public debt of Texas and redrew its western
boundary so as to exclude New Mexico. As a concession to
the North the compromise prohibited the slave trade in the
District of Columbia but stipulated that slavery should never
be abolished there without the consent of its residents or
without compensation. It further declared that Congress had
no power to interfere with the interstate skve trade. Finally
and most significantly, it included a new and stringent Fugi-
tive Slave Act. Fugitive slaves were denied trial by jury and
could not testify on their own behalf. The power of enforce-
ment was given to federal commissioners who received a fee
of ten dollars in case of conviction, only five if the fugitive
was freed. This provision, Wendell Phillips said, fixed the
price of a South Carolina Negro at a thousand dollars and

360 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

that of a Yankee's soul at five. Any citizen attempting to
prevent the arrest of a fugitive was liable to a fine of a thou-
sand dollars, six months' imprisonment, and damages up to
another thousand dollars. The Fugitive Slave Act destroyed
any hope for a satisfactory solution to the slavery problem.
Without it the South would have refused the compromise;
with it the compromise was worthless.

The Compromise of 1850 was the work of elder statesmen
born in another century for whom the Union was a sacred con-
cept and a mystical reality. In his defense of the compromise
Webster ridiculed the idea of disunion. "Secession! Peaceable
secession! Sir [addressing Calhoun and, by implication, Garri-
son], your eyes and mine are never destined to see that
miracle." Clay asked his colleagues to weigh the issues care-
fully. "In the one scale, we behold sentiment, sentiment,
sentiment alone; in the other, property, the social fabric, life,
all that makes life desirable and happy."25 For Clay "senti-
ment" meant fanatical belief in abstract principles, and he
and Webster feared the destructive power of these abstrac-
tions. They knew the difference between the disruptive prin-
ciples of the Declaration of Independence and the chastened
realism of the Founding Fathers, and they preferred the lat-
ter. Both men were to die within two years, carrying with
them to the grave the hope for a pragmatic solution to the
slavery problem.

This indictment of Garrison was not wholly unjust. Garri-
son knew little of slavery as an institution and cared less. He
'was an abstractionist, but so was the new generation of
American politicians — the William Lowndes Yanceys, Robert
Barnwell Rhetts, James Hammonds, the Chases, Sewards and
Stevenses, Wilsons, and Sumners. So too were the American
people they represented. Americans in the year 1850 were
of two minds about themselves and their destiny — on the

COMPROMISE 361

one hand, they were seeming materialists concerned with
wealth, power and progress; on the other, idealists perpetually
dissatisfied with their limited achievements which they viewed
as steppingstones toward a final spiritual goal. This goal was
indicated however indistinctly in the Declaration of Inde-
pendence. Rufus Choate might dismiss the Declaration as a
collection of "sounding generalities," but for most Americans
it embodied their ideal of the good society. The gross contra-
diction of slavery in a nation which purported to believe in
the equality of men was a fact with which they knew they
must reckon eventually. Try as they might to hide it in Mani-
fest Destiny and an expanding frontier, Americans returned
to the slavery problem, first as a question of what Clay called
"sentiment," but then, as the decade progressed, in the drama
of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and John Brown's raid. By
then abolitionist "sentiment" had become reality.

For the moment, however, cries of "The Union is saved!"
rang through Washington and echoed in New York, Balti-
more, New Orleans, and St. Louis. Bonfires and cannon
salutes welcomed Clay on his triumphal journey north to the
Newport beaches while Douglas was left to do the real work
of patching together the remnants of this Omnibus Bill. In
Boston a thousand merchants publicly thanked Webster for
recalling them to their duties under the Constitution. Doug-
las promised never to give another speech on slavery and
urged his colleagues to forget the subject. Horace Mann
looked around at the remnants of the Free Soil contingent
in Congress and sighed. Webster was damned by the aboli-
tionists as a traitor and a turncoat, "the saddest sight in all
the Western world." Fallen though he was, he was still power-
ful enough to read out of the party those Free Soil Whigs
who were "hostile to the just and constitutional rights of the
South." In the South the Nashville Convention, called to

362 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

protect Southern rights, failed to keep the spirit of secession
alive. Supporters of the compromise closed ranks, and the
Rhetts, McDonalds, Yanceys, and Quitmans were left to
await another crisis. In Mississippi the radical Jefferson Davis
was defeated for governor by the moderate Henry S. Foote;
and the state convention declared that the right of secession
was "utterly unsanctioned by the Federal Constitution." In
South Carolina Yancey formed his Southern Rights Associ-
ation without the help of the planters, who were no longer
in the mood to feed the hunger of the fire-eaters. Thirteen
cents a pound for cotton did not make for revolution.

In New York, where Garrison held the annual meeting of
the American Anti-Slavery Society in May, 1850, merchants
had organized a Union Safety Committee to put down aboli-
tionism and use their commercial ties to draw the Union
back together. On his arrival Garrison found public opinion
strongly against him. For weeks Bennett's Herald had ac-
cused him of bringing the country to the brink of dissolution.
On May 7 the Herald appealed to the "regulators" of New
York opinion to see to it that Garrison did not misrepresent
the views of the city. "The Union expects every man to do
his duty," ran the editorial, "and duty to the Union, in the
present crisis, points out to us that we should allow no more
fuel to be placed upon the fire of abolitionism in our midst,
when we can prevent it by sound reasoning and calm remon-
strance." The Herald sounded a different note when on the
day of the meeting it called Garrison the American Robes-
pierre whose only object was to destroy, and called upon
New Yorkers to destroy him first.26

The task of harassing the Garrisonians at the annual meet-
ing fell to Captain Isaiah Rynders, a forty-six-year-old Tam-
many ward-heeler, riverboat tramp, and weigher in the New
York Customs House. The year before, Rynders had proved

COMPROMISE ^^ 363

his talent at rabble-rousing by engineering the Astor Place
riot against the English actor Macready. Later he had been
arrested for the brutal beating of a vagrant in a New York
hotel. He was just the man for the job Bennett had in mind.

On the opening day of the meeting at the Broadway
Tabernacle, Rynders planted his henchmen in the balcony to
await his signal Anticipating trouble, Garrison had taken
the precaution of inviting the chief of police to attend the
sessions, and the chief had dispatched a precinct captain to
keep order. To avoid notoriety Garrison had even exchanged
his reformer's turned-down collar for a fashionable stand-up
model. He opened the meeting by reading from the Scriptures
a passage directed at the new Fugitive Slave Law. "Associate
yourselves, O ye people, and ye shall be broken in pieces;
gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces. . . . They
all lie in wait for blood; they hunt every man his brother
with a net. . . . Hide the outcasts, betray not him that
wandereth; let mine outcasts dwell with thee; be thou a covert
to them from the face of the spoiler,"

Resigning the chair to Francis Jackson, he took the floor
and began to deliver a cut-and-dried speech on the inconsist-
ency of American religious faith with American practice.
To illustrate his argument he singled out the Catholic Church
as an example of pro-slavery feeling. At this point Rynders
made his move. Were there not other churches just as guilty,
he demanded? Garrison quietly admitted that there were and
proceeded to name the Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, and
Presbyterian Churches. Once again Rynders bellowed from
his post in the organ loft. "Are you aware that the slaves in
the South have their prayer-meetings in honor of Christ?"

MR. GARRISON: — Not a slaveholding or a slave-breeding Jesus.
(Sensation.) The slaves believe in a Jesus that strikes off chains.
In this country, Jesus has become obsolete. A profession in him is

364 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

no longer a test. Who objects to his course in Judea? The old
Pharisees are extinct, and may safely be denounced. Jesus is the
most respectable person in the United States. (Great sensation,
and murmurs of disapprobation.) Jesus sits in the President's
chair in the United States. (A thrill of horror here seemed to run
through the assembly.) Zachary Taylor sits there, which is the
same thing, for he believes in Jesus. He believes in war, and the
Jesus that 'gave the Mexicans hell.' (Sensation, uproar, and con-
fusion.)27

Instantly Rynders and his gang rushed for the stairs and
poured out on the stage. Rynders strode up to Garrison and
waved his fist in his face. "I will not allow you to assail the
President of the United States. You shan't do it." Calmly
Garrison told Rynders that he must not interrupt. "We go
upon the principle of hearing everybody. If you wish to
speak, I will keep order, and you shall be heard." The up-
roar grew louder.

The Hutchinson family broke into a hymn, but Rynders
and his men drowned them out with catcalls and whistles.
Violence was narrowly averted when a hotheaded young
abolitionist leaped to the platform and threatened to kill the
first man who laid a hand on Garrison. Suddenly Francis
Jackson offered Rynders the floor when Garrison had finished
speaking, whereupon Garrison sat down and with a serene
expression waited for Rynders to proceed. Rynders ranted
and gesticulated, ranging up and down the aisles followed by
his henchman "Professor Grant." In a wild and incoherent
harangue the "Professor" undertook to prove that physiognom-
ically Negroes were not men but animals* When he finished,
Frederick Douglass stepped to the front of the platform and
drew himself up to his full height for a reply. "The gentleman
who has just spoken has undertaken to prove that the blacks
are not human beings. He has examined our whole confor-

COMPROMISE 365

mation. I cannot follow him in his argument. I will assist him
in it, however. I offer myself for your examination. Am I a
man?" Still Rynders would not give in. Over the laughter he
shouted, "You are not a black man; you are only half a nig-
ger" "Then," Douglass replied with a bow, "I am half-
brother to Captain Rynders."

Douglass finished by calling on the Reverend Samuel R.
Ward, a Negro so black, Phillips said, that when he closed
his eyes you could not see him. "Well, this is the original
nigger!" Rynders jeered. Ward acknowledged the remark
with a flourish. "Fve heard of the magnanimity of Captain
Rynders, but the half has not been told me!" He went on
to develop Douglass's theme, admitting the failure of the
free Negro to establish himself in the North and arguing
impressively for more help from the whites. When he sat
down, Rynders and his company drifted off the stage and
out of the hall. The society had won the day.

The next day Rynders returned with reinforcements to
finish the job while several police captains nonchalantly
looked on. Neither Pillsbury nor Foster, both old hands at
dealing with unruly demonstrations, were able to make them-
selves heard above the din. Garrison refused to capitulate.
He announced that free speech was still the rule and that all
those who desired should receive a full and fair hearing.
Rynders, realizing how narrowly he had escaped humiliation
the day before, refused the invitation and stuck to his harass-
ing tactics. Then Charles Burleigh cantered to the rostrum,
his black beard and long curls streaming in the breeze. "Shave
that tall Christ and make a wig for Garrison," Rynders
shouted. Finally, Rynders and his gang, who knew that no
one would stop them, took over the meeting. Marching to
the platform and elbowing the abolitionists aside, they noisily
voted a resolution that Garrison's "humanity-mongers" con-

366 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

fine their work to the free Negroes in the North. "Thus
closed anti-slavery free discussion in New York for 1850,"
noted Greeley's Tribune.

"It was not an offence against the abolitionists that the
mob committed when they broke up Garrison's meeting,"
commented the Philadelphia Ledger, "but an offence against
the Constitution, against the Union, against the people, against
popular rights and the great cause of human freedom/'28 Nor
was it a ghostly abstraction that Garrison faced in the Broad-
way Tabernacle but a live issue that provoked hatred and
violence. For a brief moment he had recognized the inherent
tragedy of the slavery question when he found himself
cornered by Rynders and his bullies, who had no intention
of accepting his rules. Then, sensing the futility of free dis-
cussion, he called on the police.

16
The Great Slave Power Conspiracy

DURING THE DECADE before the Civil War, Garrison's
prestige rose as his personal influence began to decline.
He achieved the respect he longed for but at the expense of
command. "The period may have been when I was of some
consequence to the anti-slavery movement," he told his
followers in 1852, "but it is not now. The cause is safe in
the hands of its friends."1 These friends were more than
ever a comfort to him. One of them, Francis Jackson, bought
him a new house in Dix Place; another invited him to the
Town and Country Club; others induced him to publish
a volume of speeches and poems to establish himself as a
man of letters. Each year his circle of admirers widened.
At a testimonial dinner for John P. Hale he sat with Sumner,
Wilson, Horace Mann, Palfrey, and Richard Henry Dana,
and praised the politician whom five years ago he had dis-
missed as half an abolitionist. Suddenly he became one of the
most popular lecturers on the anti-slavery circuit. Those
who used to come to hear the "monster" now gathered to
listen to a "marvellous proper man." His friends noted with
relief the passing of the prejudice against him. "He speaks
as one having authority & office," Miller McKim wrote to
Sarah Pugh. "„ . , He strikes a chord which is pure & vibrant,
the common people always hear him gladly. All classes are

3 68 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

drawn toward him; the bad respect & the good love him."2
He was acutely conscious of this new respect and worried
lest, "ill-judged and unfairly estimated," he fail to exploit
it. He avoided hostile audiences that in the old days he
would have enjoyed baiting. Now he asked whether a town
was "safe" for abolition before agreeing to speak there, not
because he was afraid of a few brickbats but because he hated
to risk his reputation and waste precious time. As he ap-
proached fifty he grew closer to his family and preferred
the company of his children to barnstorming around the
countryside with Pillsbury and Foster. Although he was in
great demand as a lecturer and spoke on the average of once
a week to anti-slavery audiences in the state, he could hardly
wait to get back to Helen and the children. He welcomed the
demands that Fanny and the boys made on him, whether it
was a school lesson to be prepared or a game of hide-and-seek.
Gradually he was acquiring all the comfortable habits and the
outlook of middle-aged respectability.

Indeed, the whole abolitionist enterprise, while hardly
popular, enjoyed a new regard now that the Boston clique
had succeeded in raising its social tone. Phillips and Quincy
were chiefly responsible for the atmospheric change in Bos-
ton, Phillips by recruiting new talent among the old families,
and Quincy by weeding out the more unkempt of the Gar-
risonians. Apostles like Charles Burleigh who dramatized
their devotion to Christ by lecturing in full beard and flowing
robes were relegated by Quincy's edict to those parts of the
state which were least civilized. Henceforth, Quincy ordered,
agents should appear decently bathed and clothed; the cause
of the slave was not to be advanced by apostolic dirt. "1 should
prefer not to have hair in my diocese," he instructed the
General Agent.3 In place of beards and cranks, perfectionists
and millenarians, there appeared early in the Fifties a group

THE GREAT SLAVE POWER CONSPIRACY 369

of new men, younger abolitionists drawn to the cause less by
religious zeal than by their hatred of the Fugitive Slave Act
— Thomas Higginson from Newburyport, Dr. Henry Bow-
ditch, James Freeman Clarke and Charles Stearns. These re-
cruits were moved by Phillips's performances and the sermons
of Parker to identify themselves openly with the abolitionists.
They were not politicians, though they knew and admired
the Young Whigs, and they were inclined to be impatient
with Garrison's nonresistance scruples. Their appearance was
proof of the increased moral dimensions of the slavery crisis.

There were still many New Englanders who remained
inveterate haters of Garrison. The Boston Irish never forgave
him for his savage attack on their idol Father Mathew, who
visited the United States in 1849. Father Mathew, the Apostle
of Temperance, was a reform priest who had signed the
Irish Appeal back in 1841 but whose primary interest was
abolishing Irish whiskey. Arrived in Boston on his temperance
mission, he ran straight into an abolitionist trap set by Garri-
son, who remembered his former services to anti-slavery and
wanted to see whether he could work a miracle upon Irish
opinion in Boston. In an interview, an account of which
Garrison published in his paper, Father Mathew declined to
take part in abolitionist meetings or to indulge in any pro-
nouncements that might jeopardize the cause of temperance.
The Liberator pursued him on his tour throughout the
country, giving readers accounts of his "perfidy77 and "apos-
tasy." The Catholic press retorted with the familiar charge
of infidelity, and Garrison shifted his sights from the Irish
priest to Catholic conservatism. Meanwhile Father Mathew
completed his tour of the country and returned to Ireland
with six hundred thousand temperance pledges and happy
memories of the "pride and glory77 of the United States.4

For all his censures of Catholicism, Garrison was no bigot.

370 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Like most of his generation of reformers he believed the
dome of St. Peter's too heavy, and he liked to exhibit Catho-
lic opposition to anti-slavery as proof of what Romanism was
in the nineteenth century and what the liberties of Ameri-
cans would become by its prevalence. He spoke of "the
extreme heresy of Rome which has stultified more intellects
and ruined more souls than any other," but in the same
breath added that all churches were "conventional, mechan-
ical, transient, and necessarily imperfect like other organiza-
tions."5 He judged the Catholic Church precisely as he did the
various Protestant denominations and found them all guilty
of pretensions to infallibility. Catholicism had its single Pope,
Protestantism its multitude of petty popes. Both violated
the spirit of Christianity by exploiting the depravity of the
human heart. His anti-Catholic prejudice inherited from a
Baptist childhood was swallowed in perfectionism. With the
triumph of eternal life would come the destruction of both
the Catholic hierarchy and all earthly institutions. He had
nothing but contempt for the nativism of the Know-Nothings
with their "perfectly diabolical" views and "monstrous" as-
sumption that Protestant Anglo-Saxons were the rightful
owners of the United States.6 He saw the day corning when
both the subtlety of the Jesuits and the nativist repudiation
of Christianity would die out.

The same optimism tinged his views of race relations. Be-
cause he felt no racial prejudice himself, he believed that the
time was not far off when it would be classed with hanging
witches as a barbaric practice not worthy of enlightened
Christians. His views on labor — the "perishing classes" he
continued to call them — showed the same unchecked as-
surance. He criticized New England industrialists who kept
their labor force at subsistence level, and demanded "more
systematic and energetic measures adopted to rescue those

THE GREAT SLAVE POWER CONSPIRACY 371

already sinking in the mire and filth of poverty and crime,
and to prevent others being swept into the same vortex,
whose condition and tendencies are hurrying them thither."7
On the other hand, he admitted that he had no plan himself
and told the American workingmen that for the present they
would have to rely on the "generous impulses" of their
betters. His belief that free society rested on an intelligent
workingclass was undercut by his assumption that tech-
nology and unrestrained competition would automatically
create one. His economic views tended to support the very
doctrine of progress which his moral radicalism protested
so vigorously. Somehow his dream of the destruction of
American institutions stopped short of industrial capitalism.

Garrison's failure to see the inconsistencies of private-
profit perfectionism did not prevent him from exposing the
hollow patriotism of mid-century America in the Kossuth
affair. In December, 1851, Louis Kossuth, already the toast
of liberal Europe and a romantic exile par excellence, pre-
pared the United States for his debut by sending ahead a
manifesto which proclaimed his complete neutrality on the
"domestic issue" of slavery and requested his friends to
do nothing that might in any way embarrass the cause of
Hungarian freedom. This announcement Garrison inter-
preted as a complete surrender to the slavocracy. "He means
to be deaf, dumb, and blind, in regard to it! Like the recreant
Father MATHEW, to subserve his own purpose, and to secure
the favor of a slaveholding and slave-breeding people, he
skulks — he dodges — he plays fast and loose — he refuses to
see a stain on the American character, any inconsistency
in pretending to adore liberty and at the same time, multiply-
ing human beings for the auction block and the slave
shambles."8

In eacposing Kossuth's nationalist pretensions Garrison un-

372 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

covered a fundamental weakness in American democratic
thought. Two years earlier at the height of the reaction in
Europe he had written an editorial comparing Kossuth and
Jesus. Admitting that Kossuth was a "sublime specimen'7 of
patriotism, he nevertheless questioned the scope of his vision.
"He is a Hungarian, as Washington was an American. His
country is bounded by a few degrees of latitude and longi-
tude, and covers a surface of some thousands of square miles."
Kossuth was strictly national, concerned solely with the
independence of Hungary, for which he was willing to dis-
regard "all the obligations of morality."0 Garrison never
read the Hungarian Declaration of Independence and was
not aware that Kossuth's Magyar ideals did not extend to
Croats and Slavs. The best expose of Hungarian pretensions
to American sympathy were two articles of Francis Bowen's
in the North American Review which identified the am-
biguous legacy of the American Declaration of Independence
and showed how Kossuth's revolution qualified on the score
of self-determination but, in denying freedom to minority
groups, failed the test of civil rights.10 Garrison only sensed
what Bowen knew for a fact, that national unity and civil
rights were not always compatible. In his groping way he
had discovered the limits of nationalism and the difficulties of
harmonizing individual liberty and national self-determina-
tion.

All of Garrison's reform interests suffered from his in-
ability to bring to them a coherent philosophy. His concern
with woman's rights was at best sporadic. He supported the
Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and attended the first
woman's rights convention in Massachusetts at Worcester
in 1850. His nonvoting perfectionism, however, made him
something less than an enthusiastic supporter of the franchise
for women. "I want the women to have the right to vote, and

THE GREAT SLAVE POWER CONSPIRACY 373

I call upon them to demand it perseveringly until they possess
it. When they have obtained it, it will be for them to say
whether they will exercise it or not."11 Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Susan B. Anthony might have been pardoned
for believing that the advancement of women in America
was a matter best left to themselves.

As he grew older he became fascinated with the claims
of spiritualism and avidly followed the debate over "spiritual
manifestations," hoping to find proof of their reality. One
evening he attended a seance held by Leah Brown, one of
the Fox Sisters, and watched while tables were overturned,
chairs flung across the room, and even heard the spirit of
Jesse Hutchinson rap out anti-slavery hymn tunes on the
table. He was convinced that no satisfactory answer to the
occult powers of mediums had been established by their
critics. "If, here and there, an individual has succeeded in
imitating certain sounds that are made, and imposing on the
credulity of those present, it is only as genuine coin is often
so ingeniously counterfeited as to make it difficult for even
the money-changer himself to detect the difference; it does
not touch one of a thousand cases where the parties have been
above reproach and beyond suspicion."12 Nevertheless, he
was troubled by the fact that none of the messages from the
distinguished inhabitants of the spirit world bore the slightest
resemblance to their earthly personalities. One message from
Nathaniel Rogers even asked forgiveness for quarreling with
him while in the flesh!

Less confusing was the "Harmonial Philosophy" of Andrew
Jackson Davis, whose "psychometric examination" of public
men also drew on occult powers. By examining a lock of
Garrison's hair (more would have been difficult to find) Davis
was able to throw his mind into a clairvoyant state in which

374 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

his subject's true character appeared clearly. He found that
Garrison was possessed of a physical system "evenly balanced
and well developed" and a temperament "peculiarly domes-
tic and social . . . His is a high order of intellect, but not the
highest. It is more than usually well arranged and evenly
balanced; superior in this particular to most public and
literary men."13 Some minds, Davis concluded, were mere
receptacles, but here was a source.

That Garrison was a source of the myth of the Great
Slave Power Conspiracy there can be no doubt. The political
conflicts of the Fifties came in large part from the growing
conviction in the North that slavery menaced free society.
Ever since he joined Lundy, Garrison had identified anti-
slavery with civil liberties, which he defined as "natural
rights" constituting a body of "higher law." Twenty-five
years of agitation had failed to endow his abstractions with
the breath of life, but after 1850 events were combining
to give his doctrine of secession an artificial life.

The Northern disunionists [Garrison wrote in 1852], affirm that
every human being has an inalienable right to liberty; conse-
quently, that no man can be held in slavery without guilt; and,
theref ore, that no truce is to be made with the slaveholder. They
declare slavery to be morally and politically wrong, and its ex-
tinction essential to the general welfare; hence, that neither sanc-
tion nor toleration is to be extended to it They are not less
tenacious, not less inexorable, and certainly not less consistent,
than the Southern disunionists. The issue, therefore, which these
parties make, separates them as widely from each other as heaven
from hell: do such "extremes' meet? What is there extreme about
it, absurdly? If the Lord be God, serve Mm; if Baal, then serve
him.' Is it a case for conciliation, for 'truck and dicker/ for in-
sisting upon a quid pro quo? To yield anything, on either side,
is to yield everything,14

THE GREAT SLAVE POWER CONSPIRACY 375

The continuing crisis after 1850 made these words ring true.

The Fugitive Slave Law raised the curtain on a moral
drama that ended in civil war. Only gradually did the slavery
issue emerge as its tragic theme, and even then it often wore
the mask of political and economic interests. Nor can it
be said that the majority of the people in the North ever
confronted it squarely until they were forced to, but chose
instead to view it obliquely as a territorial problem. Their
consciences, as Garrison reminded them, were bounded by
the 3 6° 30' parallel. Still, the moral question was omnipresent.
It arose in many different forms, only partly obscured by
available issues — land policy, tariffs, territorial regulations
— but giving the political conflicts of the decade their peculiar
intensity. Looked at in one way, the return of a few hundred
escaped slaves was not worth a war, and it may have seemed
that despite the obstructionist tactics of the anti-slavery party,
a solution might have been found short of violence. For those
Bostonians, however, who lined the streets to watch Anthony
Burns march back to slavery, or the citizens of Syracuse
who rescued the Negro Jerry and then defied the authorities,
the Fugitive Slave Law came as a fulfillment of abolitionist
prophecy. "I respect the Anti-slavery society," Emerson
wrote in the wake of the rescues. "It is the Cassandra that has
foretold all that has befallen, fact for fact, years ago."

A morality play is a drama of abstractions, and it was
with abstractions that Americans increasingly concerned
themselves as the decade moved forward, just as in the case
of the Fugitive Slave Law the North acted out of moral
revulsion and the South out of righteous determination. The
country was entering a labyrinth from which there was no
sure avenue of escape. All this Garrison had foretold years
ago.

The Compromise of 1850 brought Garrison's appeal to the

376 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

law of nature to the floor of Congress. In his reply to Web-
ster's Seventh of March speech, Seward gave the "higher law"
doctrine its classic expression. "But there is a higher law
than the Constitution," he told Webster, "which regulates
our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same
noble purposes." The territory of the United States was
part of the common heritage of mankind, and the people
residing there were stewards of God entrusted with the
enforcement of higher law. The South could no more prevent
the discussion of slavery than it could stop the onrush of
progress. The agitation against slavery would not stop,
Seward told his Southern colleagues, not even war could
prevent it. "It will go on until you shall terminate it in the
only way in which any State or nation ever terminated it —
by yielding to it — yielding in your own time, and in your
own manner, indeed, but nevertheless yielding to the progress
of emancipation."

After the Compromise of 1850 it was the North which
appeared to be bending to the will of the South by yielding
to the Fugitive Slave Law. This law brought the civil rights
issue into sharper focus than at any time since the battle
over petitions. By giving the slaveholder the legal right to
recover his property in any state in the Union, it seemed
clear proof of Southern intention to spread slavery through-
out the country by first establishing the right to recapture
slaves, then the right to bring them into the free states and
hold them there. It was a fact that only a relative handful
of escaped slaves were ever returned under the new law.
It was also true that both sections exaggerated the sins of
the other, the North accusing the slaveowners of devilish
designs on the free Negroes, and Southerners accusing North-
ern states of obstructing justice. Yet it was a poor kind of
justice that could be had under a law which denied trial by

THE GREAT SLAVE POWER CONSPIRACY 377

jury and made the word of the master sufficient to establish
title.

Boston abolitionists met the law with a new theory of
nullification and a brand of civil disobedience that went far
beyond Garrison's nonresistance creed. Theodore Parker told
his congregation at the Melodeon that when governments
perverted their functions and enacted wickedness, there was
no law left but natural justice. It was the function of con-
science to discover to men the moral law of God. "Having
determined what is absolutely right, by the conscience of
God, or at least relatively right, according to my conscience
to-day, then it becomes my duty to keep it. I owe it to God
to obey His law, or what I deem His law; that is my duty.
... I owe entire allegiance to God."15 Garrison went to
hear Parker's opinions but heard instead his own arguments,
polished a little and tightened, but the same old arguments
for the ultimate authority of conscience. Parker did more
than preach; he helped organize Boston's Vigilance Com-
mittee, elected at a protest meeting at Faneuil Hall. The
purpose of the Vigilance Committee was to protect fugitives
and the colored inhabitants of Boston and vicinity from any
persons acting under the law. Once again the city witnessed
a mob of gentlemen of property and wealth but this time
on the side of anti-slavery. The directorate included Phillips,
Samuel Gridley Howe, Tom Higginson, Ellis Gray Loring,
Henry Bowditch, Charles Ellis, and the Negro lawyer Lewis
Hayden. Garrison, whose nonresistance opinions were widely
known, was purposely left off the committee.

At first the Vigilance Committee occupied itself with
printing and distributing Parker's handbills which warned
the Negroes of Boston against slave-hunters, but soon it had
a chance to act. In 1848 William and Ellen Craft, two
Georgia slaves, had escaped North by a most ingenious

378 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

rase. Ellen, who was light-skinned, bandaged her face and
passed as a young man journeying to Philadelphia for medical
consultation attended by a manservant. From Charleston the
Crafts traveled to Richmond, from there to Baltimore,
Philadelphia, and finally Boston, where the Boston abolition-
ists heralded the arrival of the courageous couple and publi-
cized their daring escape. They had lived unmolested in the
city for nearly two years when one evening in October,

1850, Parker came home to find Henry Bowditch waiting
with the news that two slave-catchers from Georgia were
in town looking for the Crafts. The committee sprang into
action. They spirited William off to Lewis Hayden's house
and provided him with a pistol. Parker himself drove Ellen
to Ellis Gray Loring's home in Brookline, where she re-
mained until the committee deemed it safe for her to return
to the city. For another week Parker kept her at his place,
writing his sermons, he said, with a brace of loaded pistols
before him. Then he marched down to the United States
Hotel, where the unwelcome guests were staying* While his
Vigilance Committee lounged ominously in the lobby and up
the staircase, Parker held a conference with the two slave-
catchers. "I told them that they were not safe another night,"
Parker boasted. "I had stood between them and violence
once, I would not promise to do it again. They were con-
siderably frightened."16 The agents left town on the next
train.

The Vigilance Committee took a long step toward mob rule
in the case of "Shadrach," a waiter at the Cornhill Coffee
House. Frederic Wilkins, or Jenkins, who had acquired the
name Shadrach, was seized on the morning of February 18,

1851, by the United States marshal and lodged in the Court
House under special custody. As soon as the Vigilance Com-
mittee heard of the arrest, Richard Henry Dana hurried to

THE GREAT SLAVE POWER CONSPIRACY 379

Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, only to be told that the disposition
of a fugitive slave was too frivolous a matter for a writ of habeas
corpus. In the meantime Lewis Hayden was taking matters
into his own hands. He rounded up twenty men from "Nigger
Hill" behind the State House and marched into the Court
House and straight into the courtroom with his guard. Not
a soul moved to stop them as they seized Shadrach, nearly
tearing his clothes off his back in the process, and rushed
him down the stairs "like a black squall" into a waiting
carriage that drove him to Cambridge, the first stop on
the northwest road to Concord, Leominster, Vermont, and
finally Canada. The rescue of Shadrach went far beyond the
threat of violence. Here was open defiance of the Fugitive
Slave Law. From Washington came immediate orders to
prosecute Hayden and the rest of the vigilantes — three Ne-
groes and two white men. The case ended in a mistrial when
a single juror stubbornly held out for acquittal. A year or
so later Dana was approached by a quiet, plain-looking man
who asked if he remembered him.

"Yes," Dana replied quickly. "You were the twelfth
juror in Shadrach's case."

"That's right!" came the rejoinder. "I was the twelfth
juror in that case, and I was the man who drove Shadrach
over the line."17

Garrison's nonresistance scruples did not prevent him from
rejoicing over the rescue of Shadrach. "Thank God Shad-
rach is free! and not only free but safe under the banner of
England." A quick rush on the Court House, nobody hurt,
nobody wronged, simply a sudden transformation of a slave
into a free man "conducted to a spot whereon he can glorify
God in his body and spirit, which are his." Millard Fillmore
might issue proclamations and Henry Clay propose to in-
vestigate everyone who dared peep or mutter against the

380 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

law, but the "poor, hunted, entrapped fugitive slave" had been
freed!18 Before Garrison could ponder the difficulties of
reconciling lawbreaking and nonresistance, the Sims case
broke, and this time the Vigilance Committee lost.

Thomas Sims, a boy of seventeen, was apprehended on
April 3, 1851, and charged with theft of the clothes he wore
and with being a fugitive slave from Georgia. His lawyers,
the intrepid Dana, Samuel Sewall and the Democratic poli-
tician Robert Rantoul, were as able counsel as the city of-
fered. They presented Judge Shaw with a writ of habeas
corpus which he refused to honor, and then prepared to fight
a delaying action. Thomas Higginson, the young firebrand
from Newburyport, who had other ideas, rushed down to
the city to find the Vigilance Committee assembled at the
Liberator office discussing the merits of various rescue schemes
while Garrison sat silently composing an editorial. The com-
mittee could agree on no workable plan, and the members
adjourned tired and discouraged to join the small crowd
of demonstrators outside the Court House. That evening
Higginson concocted a harebrained plan whereby on a given
signal Sims would leap out of the upper-story window and
into a pile of mattresses which would be rushed out from a
nearby alley; but Sims's jailers soon dashed his hopes for a
rescue a la Dumas by putting bars on the windows overnight.
At three o'clock in the morning of the thirteenth, word
reached the committee that Sims was being removed to a
coastal vessel in Boston Harbor. Parker, Phillips, Bowditch,
Channing and the others had just time to improvise a coffin
draped in black and form a death watch behind the proces-
sion of marshals escorting Sims. Garrison was there praying
with the rest for the deliverance of the fugitive. But Sims
was not to be delivered. Three times the marshal had tried
to buy him back, and three times Sims's owner had refused.

THE GREAT SLAVE POWER CONSPIRACY

There was a lot more than the freedom of one Negro at
stake — slaveowners wanted bodily proof of their victory-
over the State of Garrison.

In Syracuse later that year the abolitionists had their re-
venge when a mob overpowered the guard, snatched the
Negro "Jeriy" and bustled him off to Canada. The Jerry
rescue also brought indictments — eighteen in all were ar-
raigned, among them Samuel J. May and Gerrit Smith.
May's nonresistance faith had broken under the strain, and
he wrote to Garrison to tell him so. "Perhaps you will think
that I go too far in enjoining it upon all men to act against
the Fugitive Slave Law as they conscientiously believe to be
right, even if it be to fight for the rescue of its victims. But
I know not what counsel to give them. And let me confess to
you, that when I saw poor Jerry in the hands of the official
kidnappers, I could not preach non-resistance very earnestly
to the crowd who were clamoring for his release. And when
I found that he had been rescued without serious harm to any
one, I was as uproarious as any one in my joy."19 May told
Garrison that if the abolitionists did not kill the infernal law,
it would kill them, and that when it came to the death-
grapple, no man who believed in freedom could disarm him-
self. Garrison was no longer sure.

He replied tentatively to the vigilantes in a long review of
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tonfs Cabin, a critique that
betrayed both a failure of imagination and a confused view
of the nonresistance question. He had nothing but praise for
Mrs. Stowe's powers of characterization, which, he con-
fessed, set his nerves trembling and made his heart "grow
liquid as water/' He was particularly moved by the figure
of Uncle Tom, who personified the triumph of Christian
nonresistance. "No insult, no outrage, no suffering, could
ruffle the Christlike meekness of his spirit, or shake the stead-

582 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

fastness of his faith."20 That the slaves ought to wait patiently
for a peaceful deliverance and abstain from all insurrectionary
movements went without saying, but what of those white
men who were attempting to free them? In his mind a change
in complexion did not materially alter the case. Violence
and the love of Christ were still irreconcilable, and theoreti-
cally no provocation whatever could justify a resort to force.
He was too skilled an agitator, however, not to recognize the
possibilities of a threatened slave insurrection; and once again
he reminded Southern whites that with their revolutionary
heritage they could not deny the right of resistance to their
slaves. If this warning weakened the fiber of Christian pa-
cificism, so did his evasions of the question of disobeying the
Fugitive Slave Act. "A great deal is said at the present time
and perhaps not too much, in regard to the Fugitive Slave
Law," he told an audience of Pennsylvania Quakers. "Many
persons glory in their hostility to it, and upon this capital
they set up an anti-slavery reputation. But opposition to that
law is no proof in itself of anti-slavery fidelity. That law is
merely incidental to slavery, and there is no merit in opposi-
tion which extends no further than to its provisions. Our war-
fare is not against slavehunting alone, but against the existence
of slavery."21 Yet sooner or later, as May had warned, he
would have to face the issue of resistance to government and
law, if not over the question of returning escaped slaves,
then over the extension of slavery into the territories*

On May 22, 1854, the Nebraska Act was passed "against
the strongest possible remonstrances," Garrison wrote,
"against the laws of God and the rights of universal man —
in subversion of plighted faith, in utter disregard of the
scorn of the world, and for purposes as diabolical as can
be conceived of or consummated here on earth."22 The law
was based on three principles: popular sovereignty, the right

THE GREAT SLAVE POWER CONSPIRACY 383

of appeal to the Supreme Court, and repeal of the Missouri
Compromise. Stephen Douglas, the architect of the law, may
have believed that geography and climate closed Kansas and
Nebraska to slavery, and he might argue that it was the
North, not the South, which first broke the Missouri Compro-
mise. None of these explanations, not even his brilliant de-
fense of the bill against the partisan attacks of Seward and
Chase, convinced Northerners of his realism or his honesty.
In private Douglas called slavery "a curse beyond computa-
tion to both black and white," but that was not what his bill
said. His bill declared that the Missouri Compromise violated
the principle of Congressional nonintervention with slavery
and was therefore "inoperative and void." Douglas admitted
that his philosophy was opportunistic and explained to his
supporters that he must either champion the policy of his
party "or forfeit forever all that I have fought for."23 Who
was he to oppose his individual judgment against the combined
wisdom of a great party? Douglas's doctrine of popular
sovereignty was a confession of moral bankruptcy: it gave
the people in the territories the power to decide the slavery
question while it denied that there were any principles
needed to guide them in their choice. His Nebraska Act
enshrined the sovereignty of the people at the expense of
human rights. It also made more abolitionists overnight than
Garrison had in twenty years.

The cost of the Nebraska Act to the Democratic Party
proved considerable. Their majority of eighty-four in the
House fell to a minority of seventy-five; of the forty-two
Northern Democrats who had voted for the bill, only seven
were re-elected. Illinois sent Lymati Trumbull, an anti-
slavery Whig, to join Douglas in the Senate. The National
Intelligencer estimated that the party's loss in popular votes
neared 350,000. This, however, was not aH gain for anti-

384 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

slavery, for the most remarkable aspect of the 1854 elections
was the vote polled by the American Party. In Massachusetts,
Henry Wilson was forced to run on the nativist ticket,
and in New York the Know-Nothings overwhelmed the
abolitionists. Seward was unavailable to head a new party;
Chase was available but not well enough known in the North-
east; Sumner was able, willing and unpopular; Lincoln was
only a rising figure in Illinois politics. "All the Whigs ex-
pressed disapproval of the Nebraska Bill, but take no action,"
Dana commented sadly. "The Democrats differ and arc
paralyzed by the Executive. . . . We can have no effectual
vent for opinion. This depresses and mortifies us to the ex-
treme." The Republican convention at Ripon was still two
years away.

Garrison clung tenaciously to his refusal to acknowledge
political action. His conclusions, given his premises, were
logical if not encouraging. In his view, only the strictest of
abolitionists could qualify for office, and such men would
never be elected. William GoodelFs candidacy for the Presi-
dency in the campaign of 1852 he called "a farce in one act."
His mood at the time of the passing of the Nebraska Act was
summarized in his resolution offered to the annual meeting
of the American Society declaring that "the one great issue
to be made with the Slave Power, is, THE DISSOLUTION OF

THE EXISTING AMERICAN UNION."

The week of May 24, 1854, was anniversary week, when
all the benevolent societies as well as the Massachusetts Anti-
Slavery Society and the Woman's Rights conventioneers
crowded into Boston. On the evening of the twenty-fourth,
Anthony Burns, a Negro employee of a Brattle Street clothing
store owner, was seized on his way home from work and
arrested on a trumped-up robbery charge. Taken to the
Court House, he was accused of being an escaped slave and

THE GREAT SLAVE POWER CONSPIRACY 385

arrested on a fugitive slave warrant issued by United States
Commissioner Edward G. Loring.

That evening Burns was visited in his cell by Colonel
Charles F. Suttle of Alexandria, Virginia, his former master,
and William Brent, the colonel's agent. The two men extracted
a confession from Burns, and when Parker and Phillips
visited him the following morning, he told them of his dam-
aging admission. "I shall have to go back," he sighed. "Mr.
Suttle knows me — Brent knows me. If I must go back, I
want to go back as easy as I can." His counsel — Dana once
more, along with the able Negro lawyer Robert Morris —
secured a postponement, but they knew that the legal case
was hopeless. The disposition of Burns would rest with the
citizens of Boston. Two plans were now set in motion, the
first a protest meeting at Faneuil Hall, the second a wild and
dangerous plan of Higginson's to use the momentum of the
meeting to effect a rescue. Let everything be made ready, he
explained, by posting a body of men outside the Court House.
Then send some loud-voiced speaker — preferably Phillips
— to the Faneuil Hall meeting and at the right moment let
him give the word that a mob was already attacking the
Court House and send the crowd pouring into Court Square
to bring out Burns.

Higginson's scheme failed only because of faulty timing.
He and his followers, armed with axes and meat cleavers,
rushed the door of the Court House while the crowd was
still listening to Phillips in Faneuil Hall They were met by
fifty of the marshal's men, one of whom was killed in the
rush. Higginson was wounded on the chin, and, dripping with
blood, he fell back with his men. They were still milling
around in front of the building when the mob arrived from
Faneuil Hall Among the new arrivals was Bronson Alcott,
who strolled up to Higginson and with orphic innocence

386 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

asked, "Why are we not within?" Informed that the first
attack had failed, Alcott nodded, turned, and marched slowly
up the steps, paused while bullets whistled past his head, and
then, realizing that no one had followed him, calmly de-
scended. Finally reinforcements from the police arrived and
the rescuers wandered off .

Abolitionist arrangements to buy Burns's freedom were
broken off when District Attorney Benjamin Franklin Hallett
intervened, and after a full week's deliberation Commissioner
Loring pronounced his verdict for Suttle. Then came a wire
from President Pierce authorizing Hallett to incur any ex-
pense in executing the law. While surly crowds hooted and
jeered, police and militia cleared the streets from the Court
House to Long Wharf, where a revenue cutter waited to
carry the fugitive back to Virginia. The marshal's posse, led
by an artillery battalion and a platoon of United States
Marines and followed by mounted dragoons and lancers,
marched Burns between rows of special police who held back
the fifty thousand spectators. As Burns remarked to the sheriff,
"There was lots of folks to see a colored man walk down the
street."

Phillips, Parker and Higginson were indicted, but after
months of legal skirmishing the case was dropped. Burns, who
had been sold on the return voyage, was purchased from his
new master by the Boston philanthropists and packed off to
Oberlin to study for the ministry. Commissioner Loring,
Judge of Probate and lecturer at the Harvard Law School,
did not fare so well The women of Woburn sent him thirty
pieces of silver, his students refused to attend his lectures,
the Board of Overseers at Harvard declined to reappoint him,
and a petition with twelve thousand signatures demanded
his removal from office. He was finally removed by the
legislature in 1858 and given an appointment by Buchanan.

THE GREAT SLAVE POWER CONSPIRACY 387

Garrison added the final touch to the case of Anthony
Burns. At an open-air celebration of the Fourth of July in
Framingham Grove he solemnized the end of the Union in
a religious rite. First he read the usual passage from the
Scriptures. After laying his Bible down he spoke to the
crowd in measured and familiar tones, comparing the Decla-
ration of Independence with the verdict in the Burns case.
Then, as a minister might announce the taking of the sacra-
ment, he told his listeners that he would now perform an
action which would be the testimony of his soul. Slowly he
lighted a candle on the table before him, and, picking up a
copy of the Fugitive Slave Law, touched a corner of it to
the flame and held it aloft, intoning the words "And let the
people say, Amen." "Amen," echoed the congregation. Next
he burned Loring's decision and Judge Curtis's charge to
the jury. Each time he repeated the incantatory phrase, and
each time his followers murmured the response. Finally, he
raised a copy of the "covenant with death," the United
States Constitution itself, and as it burst into flames pro-
nounced judgment. "So perish all compromises with tyranny!
And let the people say, Amen! "

As the communicants repeated the word for the last time,
he stood before them arms extended. The verdict had been
pronounced, he was finished. It was at once the most cal-
culated and the most dramatic action of his life, more im-
pressive even than Burns's march through the city, more
electrifying than Phillips's speech in Faneuil Hall. His faithful
were pathetically few, but that did not matter any more.
Now the whole country would know of the burning of their
Constitution.

Secession

ON THE EVE of the Presidential election of 1856 Horace
Greeley published an open letter to "W. L. Garrison"
in the Tribune demanding to know his views of the three
candidates. Greeley had followed Garrison's career from the
beginning and thought he knew the extent of his "no-govern-
ment" heresies. He assumed as a matter of course that the
Liberator would be hostile to John C. Fremont as well as to
Buchanan and Millard Fillmore, that is, until he read an
editorial of Garrison's that changed his mind. "As against
Buchanan and Fillmore," Garrison had written, "it seems to
us the sympathies and best wishes of every enlightened
friend of freedom must be on the side of Fr6mont; so that
if there were no moral barrier to our voting, and we had a
million votes to bestow, we should cast them all for the
Republican candidate."1

Now Greeley knew an endorsement when he saw one,
and he asked Garrison if he meant what he said in announcing
his preference for Fremont and claiming to speak for the
"universal feeling" of the ultra-abolitionists. In his reply Garri-
son explained that he favored the Pathfinder because Fr6mont
was "for the non-extension of slavery, in common with the
great body of the people of the North."2 His remark signaled
a retreat from perfectionism and nonresistance, a strategic

SECESSION 389

withdrawal that ended in a rout four years later when he and
his followers decided to prevent the national division they
had long predicted.

By all rights Garrison should have treated Republicans to
the same scorn he had bestowed on the Free Soilers and the
Liberty Party. He did criticize their ideas as "feeble and
indefinite" and their stand on slavery as "partial, one-sided,
geographical," but these shortcomings he now forgave in
the hope that new leadership would strengthen the party's
moral fiber.3 "In general intelligence, virtuous character,
humane sentiment, and patriotic feeling-— as well as in the
object it is seeking to accomplish — it is incomparably better
than the other rival parties; and its success, as against those
parties, will be a cheering sign of the times."4 His gradual
drift from principles to personalities and a growing inclina-
tion to make political choices while eschewing politics began
to confuse his followers and eventually drove them into the
Republican camp carrying with them, so they thought, their
leader's blessing.

Wendell Phillips remained loyal to moral suasion, but for
every Phillips there were ten Sumners and Wilsons determined
to build their careers on an anti-slavery platform. Garrison
retained the loyalty of a few partisans whom he praised for
having "the same estimate of men and institutions" as he
did, but their number grew less each year and their usefulness
questionable. He had demanded conformity too long to
change now: his disciples were still expected to study the
gospel according to Saint Liberator. The instincts of a patriar-
chal despot continued to make cooperation with him hazard-
ous and usually impossible. Ten years after his quarrel with
Frederick Douglass he still refused to appear on the plat-
form with him. Gerrit Smith, a perennial victim of his wrath,
complained more than once of Garrison's rudeness to a

3po THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD €ARRISON

man who had praised him at home and abroad. But Garrison
had a long memory for slights and snubs. Smith, he recalled,
had supported both Lewis Tappan and his clique and
Douglass himself. "I must say/' he sniffed, ahe has a singular
method of praising and vindicating me."5 No man could
endorse "malignant enemies" and retain the respect of Wil-
liam Lloyd Garrison!

The old Garrisonians were dying off — Ellis Gray Loring,
Charles Hovey, Arnold Buffum, and Effingham Capron,
Hovey, a twenty-year veteran, left a forty-thousand-dollar
trust fund that kept the destitute state society alive until
the war. In 1857 Birney died, and Garrison grudgingly ad-
mitted than once long ago he had served the cause of the
slave well. Other of his old co-workers had retired, Weld
and his wife and sister-in-law to found a school, Stanton and
Leavitt to join the Republicans. Garrison still quarreled with
those who were left. One such wrangle arose out of his un-
fortunate attempt at humor in publicly referring to Abby
Kelley Foster's "cracked voice and gray hairs*" Abby bridled
at such ungenerous treatment and demanded an apology.
Garrison refused — "because I do not see or feel that I have
been a wrong-doer." Abby accused him of belittling her
efforts in behalf of the slave. "Not so," he retorted. "I believe
you to have always been actuated by the highest and purest
motives, however lacking in judgment or consistency."6
Letters packed with recrimination and righteousness shuttled
back and forth as Abby refused to forget his ungentlemanly
behavior and he declined to apologize.

This aggressive self-righteousness, tightening as the years
passed, was slowly twisting Garrison's reform impulse into
a philosophy of obedience. His philosophy he summarized in
the phrase "loyalty to man," but his old concern with worthi-
ness betrayed an underlying anxiety. The loyalty of the re-

SECESSION 391

former, he explained, comprises, first of all, loyalty to himself,
striving to keep himself pure from sin and in progress toward
holiness, and next, to his fellow men. "We cannot bestow any-
thing upon God. But if we love Him, and wish to manifest
our love, the very best way is to obey Him; and every pos-
sible mode of obedience to Him is contained in these two —
improving ourselves, and helping our fellow men."7 The
order of duties was significant. Only when a reformer met
his personal obligation to God was he free to impeach, ad-
monish, rebuke, and, finally, "having done all, TO STAND."8

To stand where? It was all very well to insist that his
view of reform was not "partial" but "complete," yet it was
difficult to see how the peaceful secession of Northern
purists would bring about the "immediate, total and eternal
overthrow of slavery." Garrison seemed more and more
occupied with the role of Hebrew prophet. "One thing is
very palpable — our likeness as a people to the Jews of old."0
The ancient Jews were not ashamed, neither did they blush,
and their fate had been decreed by an angry God. America,
hear the word of the Lord and tremble! Jehovah would
soon exact full repentance for the sin of disobedience. Al-
ready the people of Kansas were reaping the whirlwind,
and their trials foreshadowed greater ones to come. The image
of the avenging destroyer, the God of wrath whose retribu-
tion is imminent, began to haunt him. To hasten the day of
reckoning he called a delegated convention of the free states
"for the purpose of taking measures to effect a peaceable with-
drawal" from the Union. The Disunion Convention, as it
was optimistically called, was held in Worcester in January,.

1857-

The Worcester Convention turned out to be "nothing
more than a Garrisonian meeting" with none but diehard
disunionists on hand.10 Political abolitionists were unwilling

392 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

to involve themselves in such an unpopular affair. Henry
Wilson and Charles Francis Adams sent disapproving letters,
as did Amasa Walker and Joshua Giddings, rejecting what
Adams termed Garrison's "mistaken theory of morals." His
Worcester Convention applied this theory with customary
thoroughness by voting the inevitable resolutions calling for
Northern secession. In his defense of the resolves Garrison
gave one of the most effective speeches of his career. "My
reasons for leaving the Union," he told his handful of diehard
disunionists, "are, first, because of the nature of the bond.
I would not stand here a moment were it not that this is
with me a question of absolute morality — of obedience to
'higher law.' By all that is just and holy, it is not optional
whether you or I shall occupy the ground of Disunion." The
problem was not one of expediency or the incompatibility of
Northern and Southern interests. It was a question of com-
plicity — of Massachusetts allied with South Carolina, Maine
with Alabama, Vermont with Mississippi, in condoning
wickedness. His own difficulty, he said, was wholly a moral
one centered on the unmistakable fact that the Union was
based on slavery. "I cannot swear to uphold it. As I under-
stand it, they who ask me to do so, ask me to do an immoral
act — to stain my conscience — to sin against God, How can I
do this?"11

At the end of his speech he dismissed Southern secession
threats with the observation that there was not a single
intelligent slaveholder who favored the dissolution of the
Union. "I do not care how much they hate the North, and
threaten to separate from us; they are contemptible numeri-
cally, and only make use of these threats to bring the North
down on her knees to do their bidding, in order to save the
Union. Not one of them is willing to have the cord cut* and
the South permitted to try the experiment," The time was

SECESSION 393

still 1857, and as long as Southern threats need not be taken
seriously, it was safe to preach disunion.

It may have been safe to advocate Northern secession, but
it was decidedly unpopular. Garrison's renewed agitation
plunged his organization into disaster. Wherever he lectured
— Montpelier, Vermont; Salem, Ohio; Northampton, Massa-
chusetts; Syracuse, New York — people were hostile and
audiences nonexistent. Despondently he admitted that his
old friends were almost entirely discouraged as to the cause.
"The love of some has waxed cold; some have moved away;
some have failed in business; some have been drawn into
politics; and hardly any are left to sympathize with and sus-
tain our radical position/'12 In Altoona, Pennsylvania, twenty-
five people attended his lecture, the smallest audience he
ever addressed. In Cortland, New York, a "mass convention"
turned out to be an unenthusiastic crowd of women. He
stuck to his disunion guns, blasting away at church and state,
and at one lecture had the grim satisfaction "of seeing that
my shots took effect by several wounded birds flying from
the room." He never stopped hoping that some good would
come of his lectures "beyond what is apparent."13

All that was apparent in the autumn of 1857 when he
planned a national disunion convention was the pathetically
small number of his followers. The call for the national
meeting was signed by only 4200 men and 1800 women, most
of them from Massachusetts and Ohio. They believed, in the
words of the call, that when a majority of people in the
North joined with them, they would "settle this question of
slavery in twenty-four hours."14

The National Disunion Convention was never held, al-
though a small group of Ohio disunionists finally met in
Cleveland against their leader's advice. Beginning in the
summer of 1857 a financial panic paralyzed American benev-

394 THE LIBERATOR; WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

olence along with the business of the country and gave
Garrison his excuse to postpone what could only have been
a fiasco. The panic itself he first explained as God's judgment
on a "fast people." In a more reflective mood he attributed
it to the unregulated circulation of paper money and the
foolish speculative practices of the people. "The great majority
of the people are still in leading-strings — ignorant, credulous,
unreflecting — the victims of demagogueism [sic] or financial
swindling — though assuming to hold the reins of government
in their own hands. They are blind to their own interests, and
on the whole prefer to be adroitly cheated, rather than hon-
estly dealt with."15 Beneath the surface of his Christian egali-
tarianism there lurked the old Federalist arrogance and
contempt of the masses.

The Panic of '57 stirred the ashes of religious revival which
flared intermittently during the next year. Garrison scoffed
at it. A genuine revival, he sneered, would scare James
Buchanan so he could not sleep o' nights and drive the South
to lynch its preachers. All this talk of coming to Christ,
however, was just so much empty wind. It defined nothing,
failed to reach the heart, and was wholly destitute of moral
courage. If the history of religious awakenings was any indi-
cation, the revival of 1858, he predicted, would promote
meanness rather than manliness, delusion instead of intelli-
gence,16

His new emphasis on the secular gave a revolutionary edge
to his disunionism. Abolitionists, he now believed, needed no
Scriptural proof for their convictions; they did not need to
go to the Bible to prove their right to freedom. The very
thought was absurd. "How dare you make it a Bible question
at all?" he demanded. The Declaration of Independence pre-
cluded all appeals to parchment, logic, or history; liberty
needed no Biblical sanction. At last the American Revolution

SECESSION ^ 395

and the rights of the Negro stood free from the coils of
scriptural precedent.

There was poetic justice in the fact that while the North
overwhelmingly rejected Garrison's plea for peaceful seces-
sion, developments in Kansas made his predictions of violence
come true. In the first place, the Dred Scott decision ap-
peared to support his pro-slavery interpretation of the Con-
stitution. The majority decision, which he called "undeniably
a party one," appeared to lead the North either to war or
secession. Reports from Kansas in the summer of 1857 showed
how ill-equipped the Free Soil Republicans were to deal with
demon Democracy. Here was a territory where Free Soilers
outnumbered the border ruffians five to one, and what did
they have to show for their numbers? The Lecornpton Con-
stitution. "The people of that territory are as completely
subjugated as the populace of France or Italy. . . . What
hope is there for Kansas?"17 Kansas, he declared, needed
"repentance and a thorough reformation." What kind of
reformation — whether the strong hand of Jim Lane or the
angry one of John Brown — he did not say. To demand as he
did that the North stand "boldly and uncompromisingly"
was to call it to action, and a call to action required a plan.
His lack of a plan precipitated the major crisis in his life.

The crisis began at a meeting of the society he had founded
in 1832, and it came from his old radical confederates the
Fosters. Abby and Stephen Foster had labored in the rocky
vineyard of Garrisonism for fifteen years, but lately they had
begun to watch political developments closely and particu-
larly the rapid growth of the Republican Party. They con-
cluded that the North was no longer to be aroused by preach-
ing, and they chose the occasion of the annual meeting of
the Massachusetts Society in January, 1858, to tell Garrison
so. Foster admitted that the time was when moral suasion

396 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

had done great work in the land, but he pointed to the small
audience before him as evidence that the old ways were out-
moded. "Our people believe in a government of force; but
we are asking them to take an essentially non-resistant posi-
tion which is wholly inadequate to the exigencies of the case.
They wish to vote." Up jumped Higginson to agree. "The
moral position of this society," he told Garrison, "is the
highest and noblest possible, but their practical position does
not take hold of the mind of the community." Whether aboli-
tionists ought to join the Republicans or strike out on their
own he did not know, but the Fosters were in favor of a
new anti-slavery party. The general discontent was unmis-
takable as Garrison's colleagues sat awaiting his reply.

His answer was hardly reassuring. He told his abolitionists
that they were not responsible for the way in which the
people received their warnings. "It is my duty to warn them,"
he said fixing his eye on the Fosters, "It is not my duty to
contrive ways for men in Union with slavery, and determined
to vote without regard to the moral character of their act, to
carry out their low ideas, and I shall do no such work,"18
He had shown Massachusetts her shame and demanded that
she renounce her compact with death. Was not this work
and work enough? Clearly in 1858 it was not. Although he
still controlled enough votes to defeat Foster's bid for a
political party, the meaning of the revolt was not lost on
him. Foster was asking him to choose between perfectionism
and abolition, between religion and reform, and behind the
demand lay the failure of a thirty-year experiment to unite
them. He was pondering the dilemma when John Brown,
taking the law into his own hands at Harpers Ferry, suddenly
showed him the logical consequences of his doctrine of con-
science.

He had first met John Brown at Theodore Parker's home

SECESSION 397

in January, 1857. While Parker and the other guests sat
listening, Brown matched his New Testament pacifism with
dire prophecies from the Old. Two years later Brown at-
tended the New England Anti-Slavery Convention, where
after a full day of speeches he was heard to mutter that "these
men are all talk; what is needed is action — action!" His own
brand of action forced Garrison to reconsider and then aban-
don his peace principles.

Garrison never doubted that Brown believed himself di-
vinely commissioned to deliver the slave or that the old
man and his sons were brave and heroic men. Yet he could
not help thinking him misguided and rash, "powerfully
wrought upon by the trials through which he has passed."
By the standards of Bunker Hill, Brown died a patriot and
a martyr. But by the standard of peace? Was there a place in
history for the Gideons, the Joshuas and Davids? He did not
know.19

The question of Brown's guilt continued to plague him
until finally he too capitulated to the need for violence. At a
memorial meeting held in Tremont Temple he read Brown's
address to the court and then requested permission to com-
ment on it. Then he asked how many nonresistants there were
in the audience, and when only a single voice cried out, he
paused a moment and then said that he too was a peace man
who had labored unremittingly to effect the peaceful aboli-
tion of slavery.

Yet, as a peace man — I am prepared to say: Success to every slave
insurrection at the South, and in every slave country.' And I do
not see how I compromise or stain my peace profession in making
that declaration. Whenever there is a contest between the op-
pressed and the oppressor, — the weapons being equal between
the parties, — God knows that my heart must be with the op-
pressed and always against the oppressor. Therefore, whenever

398 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

commenced, I cannot but wish success to all slave insurrections.
I thank God when men who believe in the right and duty of
wielding carnal weapons, are so far advanced that they will take
those weapons out of the scale of despotism, and throw them into
the scale of freedom. It is an indication of progress and positive
moral growth; it is one way to get up to the sublime platform of
non-resistance; and it is God's method of dealing retribution
upon the head of the tyrant. Rather than see men wearing their
chains in a cowardly and servile spirit, 1 would, as an advocate of
peace,, much rather see them breaking the head of the tyrant with
their chains. Give me, as a non-resistant. Bunker Hill, and Lexing-
ton, and Concord, rather than the cowardice and servility of a
Southern slave-plantation?®

Free at last from his pacifist scruples, he readily became
reconciled to the Republican Party. Though he still spoke
of it as a "time-serving, a temporizing, a cowardly party," he
hoped that his renewed disunionist agitation might yet save
it. Secretly he hoped that the Republicans, short of dis-
union, might check the spread of slavery by a show of
strength. Publicly he declared that they could "create such
a moral and religious sentiment against slavery as shall mould
all parties and sects to effect its overthrow." If Republicans
wondered why he still refused to vote, he answered that it
was because the greater included the less, that the immediate
abolition of slavery was incomparably more important than
preventing its extension. His refusal to vote, however, signi-
fied no lack of interest in the corning Presidential campaign,
"for in the various phases of that struggle, we recognize
either an approximation to, or receding from, the standard
of equal justice and impartial freedom which we have so
long advocated."21

From moderate support to outright enthusiasm was only a
step, and this step he took early in the election year of 1860.

SECESSION 399

He discerned a marvelous change in Northern opinion: the
battle of free speech had been won and the conflict between
freedom and slavery was now agreed to be irrepressible —
"not of man's devising, but of God's ordering." It was deep-
ening every day in spite of political cunning and religious
sorcery. "The pending Presidential election," he wrote in
September, "witnesses a marked division between the politi-
cal forces of the North and of the South; and though it
relates, ostensibly, solely to the question of the further ex-
tension of slavery, it really signifies a much deeper sentiment
in the breasts of the people of the North, which, in process of
time, must ripen into more decisive action."22 That action,
whatever it might be, awaited the outcome of the election.

He had fully expected that Seward would be nominated
and was prepared to oppose him because of his seemingly
rapid retreat from the irrepressible conflict. He despised
Seward as the incarnation of political trickery. What the
Republicans needed was a man with heart as well as intel-
ligence. Abolishing slavery would prove no mere holiday
recreation, "something that will lead on to fame and popu-
larity, to office and power." It meant a willingness to sacrifice
all these things for the sake of the slave. There appeared to be
very few leaders of the right caliber in the Republican Party,
and he was sure that Lincoln was not one of them.

Garrison's initial reaction to the nomination of Lincoln,
though unfavorable, hardly matched the outraged cries of
Wendell Phillips. In an editorial unusually vituperative even
for him, Phillips labeled Lincoln the "Slave Hound of Il-
linois" and singled out his 1848 proposal for the return of
fugitive slaves from the District of Columbia as positive
proof of his pro-slavery intentions. Garrison at first refused
to print the libel and accepted it only when Phillips agreed
to sign his initials to it. Soon, however, he joined his friend

4°° THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

in berating Lincoln as a slavocrat in disguise. Was a man who
in one breath demanded the rendition of fugitive slaves and
in the next professed to hate slavery — was such a man worthy
of confidence and support? "Such a man shall never have
my vote, either to occupy the Presidential chair, or any
other station."23 Lincoln might be six feet four inches tall,
but he was a mental dwarf.

Their denunciation of Lincoln did not prevent Phillips and
Garrison from hailing his election as a triumph of justice.
"Babylon is fallen, is fallen!" cried Garrison, and Phillips
announced cryptically that though Lincoln was in place, Gar-
rison was in power. Nothing could have been further from
the truth. In the great battle against institutions Garrison had
lost nearly all the ground he formerly held. His advocacy
of Northern secession had burgeoned into an act of defiance,
a challenge to the South to answer "our great, magnificent,
invincible North." From the arid heights of perfectionist
anarchy he was descending to the plain of power politics.
"Give me the omnipotent North," he told his society, "give
me the resources of the eighteen free States of our country,
on the side of freedom as a great independent empire, and I
will ask nothing more for the abolition of slavery."24

He flatly refused to take Southern threats of secession
seriously, since he was convinced that the South's fear of
Lincoln only showed how desperate she had become. Whom
the gods would destroy they first make mad. How far would
Southern rabble-rousers go? Would they secede? "Will they
jump into the Atlantic? Will they conflagrate their own
dwellings, cut their own throats, and enable their slaves to
rise in successful insurrection? Perhaps they will — probably
they will not! By their bullying and raving, they have many
times frightened the North into a base submission to their de-
mands — and they expect to do it again! Shall they succeed?'

''25

SECESSION 401

These assurances of Southern pusillanimity failed to tally
with his frequent references to the "brutal, demented, God-
defying oppressors" or with his conviction that the South was
one vast Bedlam full of lunatics. Eagerly he awaited the
results of Lincoln's election. It had been a long, desperate
struggle with the most satanic despotism on earth, but though
the end was not yet, it could not be far distant — "all signs
of the times are indicating that a great revolution is at hand."
Of course, Southerners talked treason, but they were careful
not to commit any acts which might endanger their necks.
"Hence, all their blustering and vaporing amounts to treason,
in spirit, language, and possible design, but not to anything
tangible."26

When South Carolina provided the tangible evidence in
December, he was willing to let the "errant sister" withdraw
peacefully. "In vain have been, and will be, all compromises
between North and South," he told his readers. "All Union-
saving efforts are simply idiotic."27 As one by one the South-
ern states left the Union, however, what had once been
sheer rodomontade suddenly loomed ominously as acts "purely
factious and flagrantly treasonable." The rebellion of the
South was not revolution in the spirit of '76, but treachery
of the deepest dye. The North, he insisted, should accept
the inevitable, form a convention of free states and band to-
gether. The Union had been an insane attempt to unite hostile
interests, hostile ideas and principles — two Gods, one for
liberty, the other for slavery, two Christs, one for white men
and the other for black. Let the new North organize an
independent government and say to the slave states, "Though
you are without excuse for your treasonable conduct, depart
in peace!"28 Strained to the breaking point by the secession
of the South, Garrison's patience did not snap until Southern

4°2 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

guns at Fort Sumter taught him the folly of peaceful seces-
sion.

In January, 1861, the Massachusetts Society met without its
leader for the first time in its history. Confined to his bed by
one of his intermittent fevers, Garrison heard how Phillips
and Emerson had been shouted down by rowdies who
whistled, stamped, hurled cushions and bottles, and finally
paraded onto the stage, where they were beaten back by
Phillips's armed bodyguard. Phillips obviously enjoyed his
notoriety and had taken to carrying a pistol. Asked by one
of his many feminine admirers whether he would use it, he
replied with a flourish, "Yes, just as I would shoot a mad
dog or a wild bull." His casual remark was an index of
abolitionist militance in the new year.

As April grew near Garrison suddenly became convinced
of Lincoln's soundness. He now saw in the President a
"rare self-possession and equanimity" which he never knew
he possessed. If war came — and it seemed likely that it
would — he decided to give all his support to the administra-
tion. He still hoped it possible for Lincoln to accept separa-
tion in the spirit of Abraham and Lot, to leave the South to
her own dreadful devices. Slavery would soon collapse and
a new Union of North and South would emerge stretching
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, "one in spirit, in purpose,
in glorious freedom, the bitter past forgotten, and the future
full of richest promise."29 He was still savoring this dream of
the birth of a true national vocation when the firing on Fort
Sumter supplanted it with the nightmare of civil war.

Lincoln's call for volunteers thrust upon Garrison the
choice he had avoided for thirty years. His losing struggle
with the problem of reconciling pacificism and abolition is
documented in four long editorials written after the fall of
Sumter. In the first of them he reversed his position on seces-

SECESSION 403

sion and flatly denied that he had ever granted the right of
the South to secede. "Certainly it is not a doctrine that has
ever been advocated or countenanced by us; and we believe
it wholly indefensible. ... we deny that, between what
the perfidious secessionists have done, and what we have urged
upon the North to do in general, there is any point of com-
parison." In a passage which must have given sour satisfaction
to the political abolitionists he admitted that the right of
secession made a mockery of the Union. How could there
be a right to perpetuate slavery? "Whence does such a 'right'
originate? What 'sovereignty' is competent to exercise it?
And if the abolitionists use their right 'for the destruction
of slavery/ does it follow that the slaveholders have an equal
right to seek the perpetuity of 'the sum of all villainies'? Is
there no confusion of ideas here?"30

Indeed there was. The confusion lay in his attempt to make
the right of revolution contingent upon civil liberties. He
was saying, in effect, that there were "good" and "bad"
revolutions, that good revolutions freed slaves and hence were
justifiable but bad revolutions were wicked and unjustifiable.

He devoted a second editorial to clarifying the problem,
and the result was confusion worse confounded. First of all,
he declared, he had never granted any state the right to secede
"ad libitum" The Declaration of Independence provided no
carte blanche for would-be revolutionists. The slaveholding
South long ago had lost its claim to the Jeffersonian heritage
and the Declaration of Independence. Where was the long
train of abuses, the denial of life, liberty, or the pursuit of
happiness? Northern disunionists, that intrepid band of true
anti-slavery heroes, presented a different case altogether.
The difference lay in their principles, in their reverence for
higher law and their ideals of "eternal justice" and "unswerv-
ing rectitude." Northern secession was based on "the eternal

404 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

fitness of things, and animated by a noble, disinterested, and
philanthropic spirit," whereas Southern secession was "the
concentration of all diabolism."31 As his self-assurance
dimmed, his prose acquired an incantatory quality, as though
he thought that by repeating the formula he might come
to believe it.

Civil war might have been avoided, he wrote in a third
editorial, by the simple expedient of proclaiming liberty to
the captives. We have healed Babylon, but Babylon is not
healed. "No other alternative is left the Government, there-
fore, than either to be driven from the Capital, or to main-
tain unflinchingly its constitutional sovereignty." He wel-
comed the change in Northern opinion which he called "total,
wonderful, indescribable." Under these circumstances who
could doubt the outcome? The South lacked numbers, re-
sources, energy, courage, and valor. Let there be no more
treasonable talk of compromise or concession, but in hum-
bling the Southern conspirators let the government immedi-
ately use the war power to proclaim universal and immediate
emancipation! 32

It remained only to bury the peace cause as decently and
quickly as possible, and this disagreeable chore he performed
in the final editorial of the series, "The Relation of the
Anti-Slavery Cause to the War." First he corrected the
"widely prevalent but mistaken opinion" as to the pacific
principles of the abolitionists. "They are generally sup-
posed or represented to be a body of non-resistants, who
cannot consistently, therefore, do otherwise than condemn
or deplore the present clashing of arms in deadly strife."
It was true that abolitionists had promised not to stir up slave
rebellions and that as Christians they opposed the use of
force generally. "But, as individuals, acting on their own
responsibility, while largely imbued with the spirit of peace,

SECESSION 405

they have never adopted the doctrine of non-resistance, with
a few exceptional cases." About his own case he said nothing
but passed quickly on to the question of the causes of the
war. "The one great cause of all our national troubles and
divisions is SLAVERY: the removal of it, therefore, is essential
to our national existence." From the beginning abolitionists
had predicted the consequences of slaveholding in the South.
"Now that their predictions have come to pass, are they to
indulge in morbid exclamations against the natural law of
immutable justice, and to see in it no evidence of the growth
of conscience, the power of truth, or the approach of the
long-wished for jubilee?"33 To his friends he added, "Let us
all stand aside, when the North is rushing like a tornado in
the right direction."34

Garrison's final estimate of the cause of the Civil War
was essentially correct — it was slavery which disrupted the
business of government, broke down the two-party system,
made every foreign and domestic problem an insoluble one,
and finally forced the South to secede. Even if the question
of slavery in the territories was abstract and hypothetical
(a debatable assumption at best), it was nonetheless real. It
was precisely the abstract quality of the slavery problem
that made it so real. The war did not come through any
expressed desire of the American people in either section
of the country or because their leaders blundered. Had a
plebiscite been held in April, 1861, an overwhelming majority
of Americans would have voted against war. But what does
this prove? That history does not always follow the dic-
tates of majority will. The story of the decade that ended
with the firing on Fort Sumter reveals the power of abstrac-
tions to disrupt the normal course of events and distort normal
political vision. Americans first tried to avoid the moral

406 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

dilemma of slavery and then to deal with it at a distance as a
territorial problem. They ended by going to war.

The rapidity with which the political crisis enveloped the
country ought to have warned the anti-slavery men of the
explosive power of their ideas. Abolitionists in general and
Garrison in particular should have known where their kind
of moral agitation would lead — had to lead. Since 1829 he had
preached the incompatibility of slavery and democracy. He
had used every weapon, framed every indictment, coined
every phrase he could find to prove that the two ways of
life were irreconcilable. Now he had to face the charges of
contemporary "revisionists" who accused him of recklessly
fostering a spirit of violence.

The question naturally arises [he wrote in 185 8], — How is this
astonishing change in Southern feeling and opinion to be ac-
counted for? It is owing to the fanatical course pursued by the
Abolitionists,' will be the reply of their traducers universally. 'If
they had not created such an agitation and thereby alarmed
and excited the South, slavery would ere this have been abolished
in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and other States. By their
fierce anathemas and their outrageous measures, they have re-
tarded the emancipation of the slaves at least half a century,' In
some cases, such talk as this is the product of honest misconcep-
tion and utter ignorance; in others, of short-sightedness and in-
attention; but generally of pro-slavery malignity and desperation.
What an idiotic absurdity it is to say that earnest, persistent, un-
compromising moral opposition to a system of boundless im-
morality is the way to strengthen it, and that the way to abolish
a system is to say nothing about it!85

The abolitionists did not cause the Civil War, but they
played an indispensable part in precipitating the crisis that
led to war. By identifying abolition with the cause of free
society and dramatizing their fight as a struggle between an

SECESSION 407

open community with a free intellectual market and a closed
society afraid of ideas, they showed their generation the ter-
rible discordance between their ideals and their behavior.
They raised the Jeffersonian model for re-examination and
with it the whole revolutionary tradition. They manufactured
the myth of the Slave Power Conspiracy and capitalized on
the Southern disposition to act as though it were fact. They
protested the closing of the mails, the denial of free speech
and the right of assembly in both sections of the country.
They turned the United States out of its course and forced it
to confront a moral question.

Garrison sensed, however dimly, that a healthy society
must tolerate the agitation of unpopular opinion. He believed
that there are certain situations in which compromise is un-
desirable if not impossible. The Civil War was such an in-
stance. The obvious fact that no one wanted a war hardly
alters the equally compelling fact that the abolition of slavery
required an appeal to force. If such situations do occur — and
in his soul Garrison was convinced that they did — then it is
a moral failure and unpardonable folly to deny that the or-
ganized use of force may become necessary.36 Garrison denied
it as long as he could. He knew that the South had been given
its chance to abolish slavery and that most Southerners never-
had any intention of abolishing it. He also knew that to de-
fend the institution the South had rejected democracy. Had
he faced the issues squarely, he should have known, probably
by 1854, certainly by 1857, that slavery would have to be
abolished by force. Finally, he should also have known that
the freedom of the Negro was worth the risk of war because
without it American democracy was a sham. In some such
recognition lay the ability to meet the crisis when it came
with rationality and courage. Garrison not only lacked a
tragic sense of history, he failed in honesty to himself.

408 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

The tragedy of the Civil War was not that it was "repress-
ible" and "needless/7 but that it was fought without any
clear sense of purpose. For this tragic lack of direction the
abolitionists, and chief among them Garrison, must bear a
large share of the blame. Garrison's great failing was not the
inciting of an unnecessary war but the lack of intelligence to
direct it for moral ends.

Armageddon at Last

IN 1863, the midstream of the Civil War, Garrison wrote a
patriotic poem for his readers depicting the savagery of
their enemies.

Satan seceded, and he fell,

In chains and darkness doom'd to dwell

With other traitors who rebel,

In act, and word,
Because he'd rather reign in hell

Than serve the Lord
Who guards us with his flaming sword.1

The demonic figure of the Southern rebel and his Northern
accomplice, the Copperhead, governed Garrison's imagination
through four years of civil war. Sometimes it brooded )ust
over the horizon, a nameless threatening shape. More often
it assumed the form of Jefferson Davis or Clement Vallandig-
ham, Fernando Wood or Horatio Seymour. Whether treason
stalked the West with the Knights of the Golden Circle or
wandered through Washington corridors or drifted over the
battlefields of Fredericksburg or rode with Grant through
the Wilderness, it was an ever-present specter in Garrison's
mind, portentous and fiendish. The Christian anarchist in
him yielded to the super-patriot who discovered traitors and
treason everywhere. His philosophy of minority rights

410 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

crumbled before reason of state, liberty capitulated to au-
thority, and Garrison joined the ranks of the demagogues.

He welcomed the war as the only means of freeing the
slave. At times during the four years of fighting he seemed to
understand what the war meant and what kind of America
peace would bring. In the summer of 1862 he was invited to
speak at Williams College and explain the abolitionists' rela-
tion to the war. He began by pointing out that true democracy
had never been practiced in America, that the first American
Revolution had not been the glorious struggle for human
rights annually invoked by Fourth of July orators but only
a colonial rebellion against the mother country. Americans,
however, had justified their rebellion with a document that
far transcended their immediate aims. "The Declaration of
Independence still remains true, in spite of our recreancy to
it." Against it the Confederacy opposed a medieval absurdity.
Jefferson Davis told his soldiers that they were fighting the
tyranny of numbers. What was this but "toryism run to
seed," a return not simply to the rule of kings but to the
feudalism of the dark ages? There were no "people" in the
South, he told the students, nor any democracy in the true
sense of the word. There was only a slave oligarchy, a class
of depressed poor whites, and the slaves. The first were des-
perate men, Miltonic fallen angels who would rather rule
in hell than serve in heaven. The poor whites were mere tools
of the masters, "demoralized, benighted and barbarous." The
Negroes offered the only hope for the South, for they were
"the only class at the South to constitute a basis for civiliza-
tion, by their deep religious nature, by the aptitude to learn,
by their aspiration for a higher destiny, and thus, 'with a large
infusion of Northern brains and muscles, to make the unity
of the republic a possible and permanent event"®

It was a picture of social revolution engineered by the

ARMAGEDDON AT LAST 4! I

North and the Negroes which he painted for his audience,
a class upheaval bringing the end of feudalism and the begin-
nings of industrial democracy, a second American Revolu-
tion. Unfortunately this vision quickly faded and in its place
there emerged the simpler and sterner motif of Republican
rule. If the Civil War failed to achieve the kind of egalitarian
justice of which he dreamed, it nonetheless changed his whole
world. It disrupted the religious movement he had created
and destroyed his philosophy of moral reform. It released
a chauvinistic urge formerly confined by pacifist scruples. It
shattered his friendship with Wendell Phillips, the one man
who might have clarified his idea of racial equality. It altered
his view of England and English reformers. Finally, the war
replaced his stable New England civilization with the raw
society and irresponsible power of the Gilded Age.

The war brought out his latent loyalty to the Union, which
he explained as "the paramount duty of the citizen ... to
the government." "Theoretically and practically, its preserva-
tion is of paramount importance to that of any local institution
under it," he announced, "hence, its right to destroy such
institutions, root and branch, is unquestionable, when bloody
rebellion is seen to be its all-controlling spirit."3 Then the
war power became competent for all activities of government,
but this power was not despotic, he told his readers, because
it rested on popular will and functioned as the organ of "THE
PEOPLE." To leave the South free to settle the slavery ques-
tion meant casting off the duties and responsibilities assigned
by Providence in delivering the slave out of bondage. As a
corrective measure for those of his old disunionists who per-
sisted in citing the Declaration of Independence to justify
Southern secession he recommended a thorough reading of
the fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah.

For the converted patriot the first two years of the war

412 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

were trying indeed. With increasing disgust he found the
government "blind" and its leaders "stumbling, halting, pre-
varicating, irresolute, weak, besotted."4 Nor did the rest of
the world, British abolitionists included, seem to understand
the dangers of Southern nationalism. "How can we let them
go in peace," he demanded of George Thompson, "they want
to spread slavery over the whole country."5 Political aboli-
tionists had been asking the same question of him for twenty-
five years.

Bowing to the demands of war, he subjected anti-slavery
to a searching reappraisal which resulted in a "Restatement
of the Principles, Measures, and Object of the American
Anti-Slavery Society," a three-column editorial in the Liber-
ator for October 4, 1861. The abolitionists, his editorial
pointed out, had worked under the original Declaration of
Sentiments for nearly ten years before adopting the motto
NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS. They had turned to the dis-
unionist slogan only to secure a hearing from the American
people; they never had been and were not now disloyal to
the Union. The federal Constitution protected the rights of
free speech and a free press, and these rights were all that
the Garrisonians had ever claimed. "Distinguished for their
pacific sentiments, they have discountenanced all violence and
disorder, and sought their ends only through a rectified pub-
lic sentiment, by the power of truth." From Christian anarchy
Garrisonism had been miraculously converted into a respect-
able theory of constitutional reform!

As soon as the Union Army entered its first summer cam-
paign, he hailed it as God's machine for dispensing retribu-
tion. The whole land would be scourged and there would be
desolation and death, weeping and mourning, but then with
the slave freed the land would have rest and the waste places
be restored. Confederate shells at Bull Run exploded this

ARMAGEDDON AT LAST 413

prediction along with the confidence of the North and left
frightened politicians and bewildered generals gasping for an
explanation. Garrison quickly exonerated the Northern troops.
As soon as war was declared he had predicted that "demonia-
cal acts" would be perpetrated by the "Southern Sepoys/*
and now in the aftermath of battle he told of wounded Union
soldiers "thrust through and through with bowie-knives and
bayonets and otherwise mangled — in some instances their
bodies quartered, and in others their heads cut off, and made
footballs of by their fiendish enemies."6 He began to hope
for a huge slave rebellion and promised that when it came "as
non-resistants, we shall give the slaves our warmest sympa-
thies." At the same time he stepped up his attack on the
"treasonable" Democratic Party, accusing it of giving aid
and comfort to the rebels.

He boasted that his peace principles were as beneficent
and glorious as ever, "neither disproved nor modified by
anything now transpiring in the country." If the American
people had accepted them long ago, there would have been
no slavery and no war. Since war had come, however, he
supported it because there was no wrong or injustice on the
side of the Union while there was nothing but lynch law
and diabolism on the side of the secessionists. In upholding
the Union he did not compromise his pacifist beliefs in the
least. "On the contrary, we wish all the North were able to
adopt those principles, understandingly, heartily, and without
delay; but, according to the structure of the human mind, in
the whirlwkd of the present deadly conflict, this is impracti-
cable."7

Lincoln's policies during the first two years of the war gave
the abolitionists scant encouragement. His annual message
in December, 1861, contained no suggestion that he was
seriously considering a general emancipation. "What a wishy-

414 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

washy message from the President!" Garrison complained.
"It is more and more evident that he is a man of a very small
calibre, and had better not be at the head of a government
like ours, especially in such a crisis."8 Perhaps Phillips was
right after all in denouncing Lincoln as a man without a
single generous sentiment. The President was obviously
paralyzed by his fear of losing the loyalty of the border
states. He was fully equipped by the war power to proclaim
an emancipation — what was he waiting for? If the provi-
dential opportunity were allowed to pass, there could only
come heavier judgments and bloodier results. The time for
an emancipation proclamation was right now!

Garrison did not misrepresent the President's attitude to-
ward the Negro: Lincoln hated slavery, but he was not an
abolitionist. He declared himself naturally opposed to slavery
and believed that if it was not wrong nothing was wrong. At
the same time he held that a statesman could not allow his
private judgments to determine his policy and that it was
particularly inexpedient, as he put it, "to practically indulge
. . . abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery."0
The result was a policy shaped largely by force of circum-
stances. Though he hated slavery, he did not believe in racial
equality. In the summer of 1862 he held a conference at the
White House with a group of prominent Negroes hoping to
get their approval for his plan of gradual emancipation. In
terms reminiscent of Jefferson's Notes on Virginia he ex-
plained to them how both the black and the white race
suffered from close contact and how the Negroes could
never hope to attain equality. In the whole country, he said,
not a single Negro was considered the equal of the white.
No one could change a condition that lay in the nature of
things. His solution, to which he clung until his death, con-
sisted of a scheme of gradual manumission coupled with

ARMAGEDDON AT LAST 415

colonization or, his own ugly word for it, "deportation."
Already he was considering the project of a group of land
speculators for developing the Chiriqui plantation near
Panama with a consignment of free Negroes; and later in the
war he actually contracted with the promoters of a Haitian
plan to relocate freed slaves on the lie a Vache. After a year
on the island, during which a third of their number died, the
deportees were returned to the United States.

Neither Lincoln nor Congress satisfied Garrison's demands
for a general emancipation policy. A confiscation act of
August 6, 1 86 1, made slaves captured while working for the
enemy forfeit but not free, and a later act made the escaped
slaves of traitors "forever free of their servitude." Congress
also abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, but a
general emancipation proclamation awaited the President's
initiative. The first move came instead from the anti-slavery
generals -— Benjamin Butler and David Hunter — who issued
emancipation proclamations of their own. These Lincoln
quickly revoked, and there matters stood until September,
1862.

Garrison naturally applauded Fremont's "wise, beneficent
and masterly procedure" in Missouri and accused Lincoln of
a serious dereliction of duty in failing to extend emancipation
under martial law. He hastened to counter Lincoln's plan
for gradual manumission with the demand for "immediate
and unconditional emancipation." By immediate emancipa-
tion he meant, now as he always had, "the recognition and
protection of his [the Negro's] manhood by law — the power
to make contracts, to receive wages, to accumulate property,
to acquire knowledge, to dwell where he chooses, to defend
his wife, children and fireside."10 Significantly, he ignored the
question of the franchise: in his mind emancipation did not
include the right to vote.

41 6 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Lincoln's deportation plan revived Northern interest in the
old colonization schemes which Garrison had assailed three
decades before. One of these renewed projects involved a
group of Boston philanthropists and industrialists who were

interested in the development of Haiti. They arranged a
meeting and timorously asked him to speak; but Garrison,
though he admitted that the colonizationists were acting in
good faith, attacked their scheme as an escape from the duty
of assimilating the Negro into American life. He spoke, in-
stead, to the colored people of Boston urging them to have
nothing to do with the plan. It might be that they would
suffer from race prejudice for some time to come, he told
them, and no doubt the temptation to go where they would
not be proscribed was a strong one. Yet the noblest work they
could do was stand in their lot and, if need be, suffer. "Before
God, I do not see how this nation can be really civilized and
Christianized if you go. You are needed to make us Christians,
to make us understand what Christianity means,5'11 If they
stayed the day could not be far off when the last vestige of
caste would disappear and blacks and whites would live
harmoniously as one people.

Garrison's faith in Lincoln's leadership grew stronger as
the military crisis deepened. He instructed abolitionists to
stand aside and let Northern patriotism do its work. Skeptical
as he was of the President's ideas on emancipation, he felt a
new responsibility toward him and cautioned his followers to
avoid any harsh criticism of his administration. Never was it
so important as now for abolitionists to weigh their words
carefully and avoid needless persecution. Instructions went
out to subordinates to quit their unpopular agitation* "I have
always believed that the Anti-Slavery cause has aroused
against it a great deal of uncalled for hostility/' he wrote to
Oliver Johnson in complete seriousness, "in consequence of

ARMAGEDDON AT LAST 417

extravagance of speech and want of tact and good judgment,
on the part of some most desirous to promote Its advance-
ment."12 He had conveniently forgotten his old role of agita-
tor.

He undertook to defend Lincoln against the increasingly
sharp attacks of Phillips and the Fosters, who withheld their
support until the government freed the slave. Suppose, Garri-
son asked, that Lincoln were given a chance to answer his
critics, would he not say something like this? " 'Gentlemen,
I understand this matter quite as well as you do. I do not
know that I differ In opinion from you; but will you Insure
me the support of a united North if I do as you bid me? Are
all parties and all sects at the North so convinced and so
united on this point that they will stand by the Government?
If so, give me the evidence of It, and I will strike the blow/ "w
The evidence, Garrison noted, was still lacking.

Such doubts did not deter Wendell Phillips and Stephen
Foster from denouncing Lincoln unsparingly. At the annual
meeting of the Massachusetts Society in the spring of 1862
Garrison fended them off with a resolution declaring the
government "wholly in the right," but the question of emanci-
pation remained* When Miller McKim, acting for Garrison,
resigned as secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society
later that spring, stating that the abolitionists' work was done,
Foster and Plilsbury denied that the work of the society was
anywhere near finished and demanded that the government
take immediate action. Although Garrison narrowly defeated
resolutions holding Lincoln "culpable," he knew that his
control over his societies had been seriously weakened. Loss
of power mattered less to him now that the war had cur-
tailed almost all anti-slavery activity and Lincoln seemed the
abolitionists1 only hope,

Yet the President's delay in emancipating the slave stretched

4i 8 THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Garrison's forbearance to the limit. In March, 1862, while the
Liberator prepared to defend Presidential moderation, Lin-
coln outlined his plan for gradual, compensated emancipation
in an overture to the border states. Even Garrison admitted
that the plan in effect offered a bounty to states in rebellion
and that there was no emergency warranting such an extraor-
dinary proposal. In view of the resolutions before Congress
calling for unconditional emancipation Lincoln's plan looked
like a decoy. Either the President was empowered to abolish
slavery everywhere, he insisted, or the war power was a
fiction. Then Lincoln vetoed General Hunter's emancipation
proclamation, and a few months later held his fateful confer-
ence with the Negro delegation, a Spectacle," Garrison cried,
"as humiliating as it was extraordinary."14 Could anything be
more absurd and untimely? Negroes might be banished by
Presidential edict but they could never be coaxed into emi-
grating. The President, Garrison was forced to conclude, was
"wholly destitute" of sympathy for the slave*

Then came September and the preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation. The pressure generated by Hunter's and Fre-
mont's edicts had gradually increased until Lincoln felt the
need to act. Garrison had expected a dramatic gesture, an
"Ithuriel spear" that would transform every "pseudo-loyal
toad" it touched into a "semi-rebellious devil"16 Though he
admitted that the proclamation marked Lincoln's new free-
dom from treasonable advisers, he was? disappointed in its
narrow compass and hesitant language. It postponed emanci-
pation in the rebel states for three months, and though it
committed the government to emancipation, it failed to pro-
vide a practical program. The document only proved that
Lincoln would do nothing directly for the slave but worked
"only by circumlocution and delay,"16

In December, when Lincoln explained his emancipation

ARMAGEDDON AT LAST 419

program in his annual message, Garrison rejected it as a plan
for buying Southern treason "in lots to suit the purchasers."
Instead of proclaiming the need of prosecuting the war with
renewed vigor and suppressing the South, the President went
into a homily about the evils and disadvantages of disunion,
and treated the war as a matter of dollars and cents. Like
Rip van Winkle, Lincoln had been sleeping for the last thirty
years oblivious to everything going on in the country. His
scheme bordered on lunacy — "it would in our judgment,
warrant the impeachment of the President by Congress as
mentally incapable of holding the sacred trusts committed to
his hands."17 His blistering editorial, which foreshadowed
his support of the Republican radicals in the days of Recon-
struction, marked the point of greatest alienation from the
President, Suddenly Lincoln looked like Phillips's first-rate
second-rate man, a reluctant leader without courage. "A
man so manifestly without moral vision, so unsettled in his
policy, so incompetent to lead, so destitute of hearty abhor-
rence of slavery, cannot be relied on in an emergency."18
Then came January i, 1863, and the final Emancipation
Proclamation.

Garrison was sitting in the balcony of the Music Hall
listening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony when the message
arrived that Lincoln's proclamation had just come over the
wire. The triumphal music was interrupted while the audi-
ence gave nine ringing cheers for Lincoln and three for
Garrison and the abolitionists. From that day Garrison be-
came a "tenacious Unionist" and ardent defender of the
President. The proclamation which he had dismissed as in-
effective he welcomed as a great historic event, and he praised
Lincoln for acting in a "cautious" and "considerate" manner
with due respect for the "obligations and prerogatives of
government" Now the President had only to "finish what

42 O THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

he has so largely performed." "Thirty years ago," he told his
Massachusetts Society a few days later, "it was midnight with
the anti-slavery cause; now it is the bright noon of day with
the sun shining in his meridian splendor."19

Thus the year 1863, the midpoint of the war, saw Garrison
give Ms full support to Lincoln and his administration at a
time when the President needed all the approval he could
get. The Republicans had nearly lost control of Congress in
1862, when five of the states which had elected Lincoln fell
to the Democrats. The Emancipation Proclamation and the
resurgence of the Democratic Party furnished two good
reasons for upholding the President, but even more important
was Garrison's growing awareness of the dimensions of poli-
tical leadership. All his life he had sought the components of
the great man — in Timothy Pickering, Harrison Gray Otis,
Lyman Beecher, Daniel Webster — only to be disillusioned
by his hero's flaws or baffled by his own fear of authority.
Now in the midst of civil war he suddenly realized that for
all his failings Lincoln was a great leader and a great man,
A year that witnessed Burnside's costly blunder at Fredericks-
burg and Hooker's mistake at Chancellorsvillc, draft riots in
New York, and the rapid growth of Congressional opposition
to the President also saw the education of Garrison in the
ways of democratic leadership. In view of the continued
obstructionist tactics of his followers his decision to stand
by Lincoln required intelligence and courage,

The alternative to Lincoln's policy of moderation was the
Carthaginian peace advocated by the Radicals in Congress
and by Wendell Phillips. The Radicals were determined to
secure freedom for the Negro, confiscate the estates of the
rebels and distribute them among their former slaves, dis-
franchise the masters, and rule in the name of Northern
righteousness. Phillips took the lead in denouncing Lincoln

ARMAGEDDON AT EAST 421

for his "heartlessness, and infamous pandering to negro-
phobia," his "senile lick-spittle haste" in following die direc-
tives of disloyal Northerners, "The President and the Cabinet
are treasonable," he told a Republican audience in 1862* "The

President and the Secretary of War should be impeached."
To a Cooper Union crowd he said that the President never
professed to be a leader. "He wants to know what yon will
allow and what you demand that he shall do." Privately he
told Sumner, "Lincoln is doing twice as much today to break
this Union as Davis is. We are paying thousands of lives and
millions of dollars as penalty for having a timid, ignorant
President all the more injurious because he is honest."20 On
the other hand, unlike Garrison, Phillips knew what emanci-
pation and the return of peace must bring — food and housing
for the Negro, access to the land, education and welfare legis-
lation, and the key to all these, the right to vote. Garrison
was hampered by his refusal to consider a social revolution*
He opposed giving the Negro the franchise and remained
wholly ignorant of the conditions in the South which de-
manded social legislation. The differences between the two
men, which were magnified in the years to come, originated
in the clash between a romanticized evangelical Christianity
and the skeptical, secular outlook of a professional reformer.
Despite his defense of Lincoln, Garrison did not intend to
relinquish all right to criticize the administration* When
Lincoln issued his reconstruction plan in December, 1863,
he joined Phillips in condemning it Lincoln hoped to re-
establish the state governments in the South with one-tenth of
the voters who would take an oath of allegiance to the Union
and agree to make temporary arrangements for the appren-
ticeship of former slaves. Garrison complained of the exces-
sive lenience of the President's plan, which allowed the rebels
to vote and disfranchised a whole body of loyal firemen*

422

THE LIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

"It opens the way for duplicity and perfidy to any extent,
and virtually nullifies the confiscation act of Congress, a
measure next in importance to the abolition of slavery."21 As
yet he was not prepared to face the possibility of a head-on
conflict between the President and Congress over recon-
struction; he only knew that Lincoln's magnanimity was a
weakness.

At the same time he closed the columns of the Liberator to
his old pacifist friends. What would peace gain if men who
fought for other things would not fight for liberty? "The
way to peace, permanent peace, as things are now is mani-
festly for the conflict to go on, until liberty shall become
universal When we get this liberty, we shall have peace."23
The pacifists tried to press the peace question on him only to
be told that "this is not the best period for an abstract ethical
discussion of the question of Non-Resistance.'123

He still held that private scruples need not prevent the
exercise of public duty and that the accommodation of peace
principles to the realities of war did not invalidate them* He
asked the principal of the Boston Latin School to excuse his
son Frank from military drill, but the problem of the draft
he met with a piece of rationalization. The true nonrcsistant,
he said, should refuse to serve and also decline to hire a sub-
stitute, though he might submit in good conscience to the
fine exacted by the government for failure to serve. When
his Quaker friends refused to accept this line of reasoning,
he avoided further argument and cheerfully suggested that
"everyone will do well, and best, to be fully persuaded in
his own mind."24

This was the advice he gave to his oldest son George, who
did not share his pacifist beliefs and succumbed to the pa-
triotic fervor of the recruiters. Much to his disappointment
George accepted a commission as a second lieutenant in the

ARMAGEDDON AT LAST 423

Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, the first Negro outfit
in the Union Army. Garrison begged George to reconsider,
but when the young man refused, he reluctantly accepted
his decision. When George marched down State Street with
his regiment on his way to the Carolinas, Garrison stood
watching at the corner of Wilson's Lane, where twenty-eight
years earlier a mob had dragged him unresistingly toward
the Court House.

I miss you by my side at the table, and at the printing-office [he
wrote George], and cannot get reconciled to the separation. Yet
I have nothing but praise to give you that you have been faithful
to your highest convictions, and, taking your life in your hands,
are willing to lay it down . * . if need be, in the cause of free-
dom, and for the suppression of slavery and the rebellion. True,
I could have wished you could ascend to what I believe a higher
plane of moral heroism and a nobler method of self-sacrifice; but
as you are true to yourself, I am glad of your fidelity, and proud
of your willingness to run any risk in a cause that is undeniably
just and good.25

In December, 1863, Helen Garrison suffered a stroke
which left her partially paralyzed for the rest of her life. The

shock of his wife's illness nearly prostrated Garrison, who

now that the children had grown up was more than ever
dependent on her* He spent most of his time at home now,
nursing Helen, doing small chores about the house, and por-
ing over his list of exchanges. He still attended the conven-
tions and the meetings, but with less and less enthusiasm* He
admitted that he was tired — tired of making speeches, tired of
the constant friction with younger and more impetuous aboli-
tionists. For the first time in his life he was willing to leave
the arguments and the bickering to others. As it happened,
they were unwilling to accept his offer of peace*
At the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Society in

424

THE tIBERATOR: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

1 864 Phillips accused the government of a readiness "to sacri-
fice the interest and honor of the North to secure a sham
peace." Garrison bridled. "Now, sir," he said patiently to
Phillips, "I do not believe a word of it, and I cannot vote for
it." There was a time, perhaps, when he had had little confi-
dence in Lincoln, but since the Emancipation Proclamation
he had changed his mind. True, the President was slow in
making decisions and needed spurring on, but no one could
really believe that he was ready to make a sham peace. "This
is a very grave charge."26 But Phillips had the votes; Garri-
son's amendment to his resolution was beaten and the society
went on record as opposing Lincoln's administration. From
that moment Garrison lost interest in the organization he had
founded and began to concentrate on re-electing Lincoln.

As early as January, 1864, the Liberator was broadcasting
its edito